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, with translations to difficult-to-translate words and phrases, and the newsletter English in Progress, about the English language as a living, evolving thing.
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?
I love gourmet dining for Sinterklaas. The whole family making little pancakes with their little pans, it’s so much fun!
I like making savoury pancakes, with tomatoes, mushrooms and paprika.
Then I put cheese on top and grill them. (Note: only a problem for American English speakers.)
After that, time to open the surprises!
The Dutch in English
A stockholder is literally the holder of a stick
This etymology is contested, but it is so interesting and plausible-sounding that I wanted to share it with you anyway:
Tallysticks have been used through history as evidence of a financial transaction. When a financial transaction took place, a stick would be notched as evidence of the transaction. Once the transaction was recorded, the stick was split lengthwise and each party received a piece. Because every stick splits in a unique way, you could always know which two halves belonged together.
In another method, once the notches were made, one small stick was carved out of the larger stick. The larger one was the lender and the shorter one was the debtor. (To this day, we don’t like to have “the short end of the stick.”) The long end was the stock; it is better to be a stockholder. The lender could sell the obligation to another. The debtor knew a stranger’s claim was true because the sticks matched.
So if you have ever thought that the “stock” in “stockholder” or “stock market” sounded a lot like the prosaic Dutch “stok”, you were right! The English doesn’t come from the Dutch, in this case, but it is fun to see that the meaning of “stock” can indeed be said to come from “stick”!
Dutch/English in the news
New book: De Tawl, by Philip Dröge
Until the 19th century, entire communities in the US spoke archaic Dutch; in the states of New York and New Jersey especially. Journalist and historian Philip Dröge tells the story of this American Dutch in his new book De Tawl – Hoe de Nederlandse taal (bijna) Amerika veroverde.
Dutch chef cooks for New York university
Binghamton University, in Upstate New York (you add “upstate” to make clear you are not talking about New York City, but about the other part of the state of New York) was visited by Dutch chef Evelien de Bot who made kibbeling and pea soup.
What I love about this article is that these people were apparently so enthusiastic about this visit that they organised 1) a giant orange T-shirt with a map of the Netherlands on it that was big enough to fit their mascot, 2) an impressively big wooden windmill, 3) tulips and clogs and flags and 4) “traditional Dutch music” (lord knows what that means) 5) two Dutch students who were polite enough to say that “the music really brings back memories”. Bless them.
A key part of Dutch culture is melting away
Bloody depressing, but there we go. This English piece by Dutch journalist Tim Brinkhof talks about one of the first victims of climate change: ice skating in Northern Europe.
Dutch film “Grenzeloos Verraad” will be distributed internationally under the name “Betrayal”
“Grenzeloos Verraad”, directed by Dennis Bots, is a WWII film that came out in the Netherlands last summer. The film is pretty good when you consider how it was made; by people with little to no experience, with a tiny budget of 300,000 euros and with the help of war re-enactment hobbyists. The acting, apparently, is not always up to scratch, but the film has still been deemed good enough for international distribution, which is pretty amazing when you read that the makers were hoping for just a few filmhuizen in the Netherlands. English trailer here.
Recent translations
spontaan
This was one that I struggled with. There’s this slight difference between the English “spontaneous” and the Dutch “spontaan” that is difficult to pin down. “Spontaan” tends to be used in a positive sense more often, I think, and it is also simply a more popular word in Dutch. “Een spontaan mens” is better translated as “a bubbly person” or “someone whose lust for life is infectious” than “a spontaneous person”, but the last translation isn’t wrong. What do you think? More here.
ik sjouw me een ongeluk
Two problems in this sentence that was posed to me via email. “Sjouwen” and “me een ongeluk”. Both have pretty good, but rather informal, translations: “I am schlepping my ass off”. Only okay if you are a crass builder in 1950s America, I’m afraid. So how to solve it for the rest of the world? I was rather happy with “I feel like a human forklift”, but a more literal option might be “I'm getting pretty worn out from hauling all this stuff.” More here.
behelpen
As a verb, behelpen isn’t tricky to translate. “We moesten ons behelpen met wat er was” becomes “we had to make do with what was there”. But the Dutch sentence “Het was allemaal nogal behelpen” is much trickier to translate. My favourite solutions are “The whole thing was far from ideal”, “it was all rather makeshift” or “we ended up having to improvise a lot”. More here.
dat moet er nog bijkomen
I love it when I get a question in my inbox that is easily answered. The angry Dutch person who calls out in frustration “dat moet er nog bijkomen!” can be served by the English “that’s the last straw”, “that’s the last thing I needed” or they can turn up their sarcasm to the max for a heated “well, that’s just perfect”. More here.
Answers quiz
I love gourmet dining for Sinterklaas. The whole family making little pancakes with their little pans, it’s so much fun!
What the Dutch speaker wanted to say: Ik houd van gourmetten met Sinterklaas.
What an English speaker would understand: gourmet dining = upper class dining in a fancy restaurant.
(Yes, I have really seen this translation for “gourmetten”. It is more usual, though, for a Dutch speaker to say *gourmetting*, knowing that it is probably wrong, but having no idea how to say it in English correctly.)
How the Dutch speaker should have said it: there is no good translation. The thing you do “gourmetten” on is called a tabletop grill, so you could phrase it around that.
For Sinterklaas, our family does this Dutch thing that I love. We put a tabletop grill on the table, with a buffet of ingredients all around it, and little pans to cook them in. The whole family making little pancakes with their little pans, it’s so much fun!
For English-speakers who are familiar with this crazy Dutch tradition, I think you can use “gourmetting”. You are then using the Dutch term for the Dutch tradition. Just don’t do it when speaking to people who are not familiar, because they will have no idea what you are talking about! More here.
But isn’t “Sinterklaas” wrong as well?
You can choose to say something like “Sinterklaas, which is a bit like Christmas, but earlier in December”. Many English speakers who are somewhat familiar with Dutch culture will have heard of Sinterklaas, but they will probably not have heard of gourmetten, which is one experience level further into Dutchness.
I like making savoury pancakes, with tomatoes, mushrooms and paprika.
What the Dutch speaker wanted to say: Ik houd ervan om hartige pannenkoekjes te maken, met tomaten, champignons en paprika.
What an English speaker would understand: Ik houd ervan om hartige pannenkoekjes te maken, met tomaten, champignons en paprika poeder.
This is one that not many people know. The word “paprika”, to English speakers, only refers to the powder. The vegetable is called a pepper, a bell pepper, or in Australia, New Zealand and India, a capsicum.
How the Dutch speaker should have said it: I like making savoury pancakes, with tomatoes, mushrooms and bell pepper.
Then I put cheese on top and grill them.
What the Dutch speaker wanted to say: Dan grill ik ze met kaas.
What an English speaker would understand: As I hinted above, “to grill” used in this way is only a problem for American English speakers. For speakers from the UK, Australia etc. there is nothing wrong with the sentence.
For Americans, to grill only refers to the type of grilling you do on a barbecue or on top of a hot plate. If you put cheese under a heat source so that it can melt, then for Americans, this is called “to broil”.
How the Dutch speaker should have said it:
For most of the world: Then I put cheese on top and grill them. (To be honest, I think I would have said “Then I put cheese on top and stick them under the grill.” but that might just be me.)
For an American/ Canadian audience: Then I put cheese on top and broil them.
After that, time to open the surprises!
What the Dutch speaker wanted to say: Daarna is het tijd voor de surprises!
What an English speaker would understand: Daarna is het tijd om de verrassingen open te maken!
(It’s not too far off, really, is it?)
How the Dutch speaker should have said it: There is no good translation for our “surprise” tradition, but it is quite similar to Secret Santa. In this case, a good way to say it would have been
After that, time for Secret Santa!
And finally…
And finally, a silly joke or video that I found on the Internet, that has something to do with Dutch and English.
Today:
(If you managed to miss him, Tom Holland is a very popular young actor, most famous for playing Spiderman in his most recent iteration.
Tom Holland is British, and has nothing at all to do with the Netherlands. His last name just happens to be “Holland”, which is quite a normal surname in the UK. I tried to look up how normal, exactly, but alas, the UK does not have statistics on surnames. America does a census every ten years and in 2020, “Holland” ranked as the 305th most popular name, with 102,538 bearers of the name. In both countries the name is more usual than in the Netherlands, I think, where there were only 693 bearers in 2007.)
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The number of mistakes in this newsletter is directly proportionate to the number of times my three-year-old woke me up last night.
Image credit birds: rawpixel.com
I wonder if the translation for "spontaan" is, oddly, at least for American English, "chill." Contestants on Dutch dating series (and I confess I watch a lot of them) use this word so often to describe someone that's friendly, easy to be around. I think often you could swap in an American saying: "She's chill" or: "I want to meet someone chill" and get at the same sentiment?
And I do think the English use "bubbly" the same way, again this is based exclusively on my expertise as a shameless Love Island fan.
Wait, the US has so many more inhabitants, perhaps in percentage terms the name "Holland" is just as popular? (These questions always pop into my mind AFTER I've pressed "send".) But now I've worked it out. The surname "Holland" is about 10 times more popular in the US than in the Netherlands.