A real water rat 🐀, Amsterdam rules 👑, feeling forlorn 🥀
Welcome to the latest instalment of English and the Dutch, the newsletter with tips and tricks, fun facts, new translations and other good stuff about how Dutch speakers speak English. In your inbox every third Wednesday of the month.
The newsletter is written by me, Heddwen Newton. I’m half Dutch, half British, and I work as a translator, teacher and linguist. I am also the owner of the website www.hoezegjeinhetEngels.nl.
Quiz
This Dutch speaker isn’t saying what they want to say with these sentences. What are they trying to say? What does the English speaker understand? How should they have worded it?
John is a real water rat.
He swims in the sea during flood, which I have told him is dangerous.
“I don’t want to lose my favourite nephew!” I tell him. “Your mother, my aunt, would kill me!”
The Dutch in English
If you are feeling forlorn, you are alone and unhappy. A forlorn place is deserted and uncared for.
It’s a lovely, poetic word, that has a rather prosaic Dutch sister which might jump out at you if I give you its old spelling: “forloren”.
There used to be a verb in English “forlesan” (back when English still had verbs ending in “n”, like Dutch still does today), which meant “to be deprived of, lose, abandon”.
In the old verb, you will recognise our verb “verliezen”, and “forlorn”, then, is cognate to “verloren”. The phrase “forlorn hope” has been around in English since the 1570s and is a translation of our “verloren hoop”.
Dutch/English in the news
Three stories with a link to Amsterdam this month. Not because I’m such a fan of Amsterdam, but just because they were the most interesting!
Occupied City: chronicle of Amsterdam during wartime
Here’s something I didn’t know: Dutch historian and journalist Bianca Stigter is married to British film director Steve McQueen who made 12 Years a Slave. McQueen has recently made a documentary based on Stigter’s book Atlas van een bezette stad. Amsterdam 1940-1945. If I understand correctly, it is a four-hour film with footage of Amsterdam in 2022 while a voice-over gives details of what happened in Amsterdam between 1940 and 1945. I can’t quite picture how this would work, and I cannot find a trailer online, but the reviews are good.
The film premiered during Cannes last summer, and was just a part of the London Film Festival, which is why it is getting news coverage again. I cannot find any information about its release in the Netherlands or Belgium, only that there is a distributor, so it should have a Dutch release at some point. It’s all a bit mysterious!
How Amsterdam started a fashion revolution
This Guardian article tells the story of United Repair Centre in Amsterdam, a place where refugees repair clothes for large fashion brands. It started only last year and is already a big success.
Professor uses Amsterdam cycling history to educate Brisbane
Dutch social scientist Marco te Brommelstroet spoke in Brisbane, Australia, about how to get a city to become a cycling city. What is currently wrong with Brisbane? Another interviewee put it well: “From my window right now, I’m watching a lady riding down the street with a kid in the toddler seat behind her and a young kid riding her own bike independently down the street. But they’re riding on the footpath, which is kind of everything that’s wrong with Brisbane.”
Recent translations
keycord
I got an email from a student on an exchange in the States who had found, to his surprise, that “keycord” wasn’t “keycord” in English. A great addition to my list of pseudo-anglicisms! In English, a strap that you wear around your neck to hang something from has had a name for centuries: we call it a lanyard. More here.
onder de rook van
A bit overused in Dutch, if you ask me… An old friend actually reached out via Facebook to find out how to translate this one. Happy to reconnect and translate at the same time! My favourite translation is “within spitting distance”, but that’s not really a translation you can use in a refined piece of writing. Americans say “in the shadow of”, which sounds weird to me as a Brit. I think in many cases your best bet is just to go with “near”. More here.
statiegeld
I suddenly found myself doubting the translation “deposit” for statiegeld while speaking English. “Deposit”? That doesn’t sound right. Well, of course it didn’t, I realised when researching the article, because the UK never had such a system, so I never encountered the word in my English-speaking life. The translation is, in fact, “deposit”, and hopefully we’ll start hearing it more often as many English-speaking countries are set to introduce deposit return schemes. Better late than never! More here.
verslikken
Language is just odd, sometimes. How come Dutch has a common word for a common occurrence, and English has to make do with “I almost choked” or “it went down the wrong way”? The medical term, “to aspirate” (= to inhale something you shouldn’t have) isn’t quite the same and is unknown to the general public. More here.
Answers quiz
John is a real water rat.
The Dutch person meant to say: John is een echte waterrat
An English speaker would understand: They would probably understand that you are not literally referring to the water vole, or to an actual rat. But they would be confused, and they might think that you are calling John a “rat”, someone who is likely to betray you in some way.
Should have been: John loves to swim/ John loves being in the water
He swims in the sea during flood, which I have told him is dangerous.
The Dutch person meant to say: Hij zwemt terwijl het vloed is (hij zwemt bij vloed?) I’m not actually sure how to say this in Dutch!
An English speaker would understand: They would probably think you are trying to say “he swims during a flood” which means “hij zwemt tijdens een overstroming”
Should have been: He swims in the sea during high tide
“I don’t want to lose my favourite nephew! Your mother, my aunt, would kill me!”
The Dutch person meant to say: mijn favoriete neef (zoon van mijn oom of tante)
An English speaker would understand: mijn favoriete neef (zoon van mijn broer of zus)
Should have been: I don’t want to lose my favourite cousin! - this is one of those false friends that Dutch speakers know, but that they get wrong in conversation anyway. I hear this more often than you might think, and from people who otherwise speak excellent English.
And finally…
You might have come across this one already, but because it is so good, here is Lucas Nicholas’ splendid translation and rendition of Acda en de Munnik’s Het regent zonnestralen. Nicholas is Dutch, but spent a long time in Australia.
Thanks for reading! If this newsletter was sent to you by someone of obvious impeccable taste, you can use this button to subscribe:
The number of mistakes in this newsletter is directly proportionate to the number of times my three-year-old woke me up last night.
The Eye is playing this film https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/whats-on/de-bezette-stad/1118557
I think that with "deposit" you're referring to a small fee that's charged for e.g. glass bottles that's then refunded when the bottle is returned—? That is (or used to be) common in the US; different states had different requirements for this. I haven't seen it in a while, probably because in most places there are dedicated recycle bins.