Offtopic discussion split from: Kingfishers for Sale

Here you can post stuff that is not related to Christopher Ward
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hantsman
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Re: Offtopic discussion split from: Kingfishers for Sale

Post by hantsman »

Now about the CW watch....................... 8)
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peterh
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Re: Kingfishers for Sale

Post by peterh »

John wrote:I'm also from the Netherlands and i think it's very stupid to let your own langauge down like down like that.
I'm also also too from the Netherlands, and I think that you've read something that was never written - or at least not by me.

I definitely don't dislike the Dutch language - it has a certain Calvinistic effectiveness that is hard to match, and that is definitely more pleasing to me than the baroque characteristics of, say, French.
Plus it's an extremely expressive language, phonetically. The throaty G and the rolling RRR are pretty unique.

The mere fact that I think that a Dutch swear word sounds intimidating does not mean that I put the Dutch language down. On the contrary: I think that this illustrates that I think that Dutch is a very powerful language, especially phonetically.

But in a verbal sense, English is a much more powerful language - much more so than Dutch, it can be moulded to very specific artistic needs - and it's a lot easier to learn too.
There are several reasons for this, but the most important reason, I think, is that English has been used so much all around the globe that most of the excessive ballast (grammar rules that didn't seem to serve any purpose, like different spelling of verbs for imperfect present first person plural) have worn off at a faster pace than any other modern language.
The other reason may be that English is much more a part of the "public domain" than Dutch (or German, or French, or Italian). The world realises darn well that nobody owns the English language. The same may be true for Spanish, but I don't know enough about the Spanish language to be able to even have an idea.

Which brings me to another thing that bothers me about Dutch (and German, and French): the incessant habit of the Government effing about with it. We've had more 'spelling reforms' during my lifetime than I care to remember, sometimes with really outrageous results. The latest two spelling reforms made it clear that the committee really had no idea of etymology - they had no idea why a word was spelled like it was, and on a couple occasions they apparently had no idea what the word meant. As a result, they created a situation that, in parts, can be described as a royal mess.
For the Dutch speakers among us, an example (trust me, I won't mention the moronic construction "pannenkoek"):
They respelled the word "zielerust" as "zielenrust". For crying out loud...
To me, this makes it clear that they had no idea what the word "zielerust" means, and why it was spelt that way. "Zielerust" is not the peace that more than one soul finds - there is no reason whatsoever to make this plural. It was spelt "zielerust" because historically, the word "ziel" is etymologically related to the German "Seele", and "zielerust" just rolls off the tongue easier than "zielrust". Muck like "hartepijn" (the pining of ONE heart) rolls off better than "hartpijn". Yet, "hartepijn" was spelling-reformed into "hartenpijn" (the pining of more than one heart).
Pannekoek is in fact much the same story.

The other results of all these spelling reforms is that, for someone who has gone through two or three spelling reforms in a lifetime, it gets very hard to know how to spell a word correctly. On top of that, while the reasoning behind the reforms was invariably "to make the language spelling more consequent and easier to learn", there is no evidence whatsoever that the ability of the Dutch to spell correctly has improved.

I am not aware of any spelling reforms of the English language. My guess is that this may be partly due to the fact that no single government assumes that they "own" the English language, and it is therefore left to its own devices, and it does not resist to being moulded to fit arising needs. It is by far the most "organic" language that I know.

So much about the spelling reforms.

While the Dutch language may be "less than 2000 years old", I think that goes for most modern languages in the Western world. Without in-depth knowledge, I think I can safely assume that whatever it was that the people inhabiting the British Isles 2000 years ago only bears a formal relationship to current English. I suspect that not many English folks can actually read Beowulf without liner notes. The same holds true for ancient Dutch (Middel-Nederlands) - Marieken van Nimwegen or Karel ende Elegast are not works that can be easily read by the uninitiated (and of course it gets worse when Haagse Harry, a literary work ffrom the 20th century, is introduced in the equation ;) ;) ;) )

When all is said and done, I think we should realise that language is FORMALLY not an end in itself, but merely a means to an end - communication.
But it's also a beautiful thing to play with. The more powerful a language is, the more you'll find that, whatever you want to say, there's always a different way of phrasing it.
Man with one watch, always know time. Man with many watches, never sure.
(unidentified Chinese philosopher)
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