Oh, on that bicycle! 🚲 Podcast tips & a fairy-tale quiz 🏰
Welcome to the latest instalment of English and the Dutch, the newsletter with tips and tricks, fun facts, interesting 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 the owner of the website www.hoezegjeinhetEngels.nl, and I also write the newsletter English in Progress.
Quiz
False friends
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?
In a land far away, a drake sat by the edge of a village, breathing fire at anyone who came near.
The middle-aged village was in turmoil. They needed a hero.
A brave knight approached the monster, but the beast bit off his underarm!
(In the end, of course, the princess saved the day. But describing all that would be more than one quiz!)
Idiom
The idiom depicted below is the same in English and in Dutch. What is the idiom in English? What is it in Dutch?
Family ties
Dutch and English are cousins, perhaps even sisters, depending on how you like your familial metaphors. In this section, I highlight some surprising ways in which they are related.
flour & bloem
In English, we have flower, meaning the seed-bearing part of the plant, and flour, meaning a powder obtained from grinding grain. In Dutch, we have bloem, meaning the seed-bearing part of the plant, and bloem, meaning a powder obtained from grinding grain. How did that happen?
In English, the word flower came from the French, who used it to mean blossom but also to refer to the finest part of something. Flour is called flour because it is the finest part of the meal, the meal being the ground grain (meel). (Source.) In French, this origin is even clearer, because fine flour in French is still called fleur de farine, meaning flower of the meal.
In Dutch, we took our word for flower from Germanic rather than French (compare German Blume), but nevertheless old Dutch had the exact same double meaning; it could mean flower, but it could also refer to the finest of something. And we did the exact same thing, we referred to the finer part of ground grain as bloemmeel, which later became just bloem. (Source.)
Flower to mean the finest also still exists in a few phrases and expressions. In Dutch we have the word bloemlezing, where bloem also refers to the finest of something. (In this case, a lezing, which is an old word for selection.) We also used to say de bloem der natie to refer to the finest people in the nation. And in English you might still hear someone is in the flower of youth, which Dutch people will easily recognise to mean that the person is in de bloei van zijn jeugd; the finest years of youth.
Why did flower also become flour in Dutch, French and English but not in e.g. German? (Blume does not mean flour in German.) I don’t know. Though Germans do use the term die Blume des Bieres to refer to the foam on a good glass of beer, so I guess they just wanted to keep their word for the finest of things for the really important stuff. (Source.)
meel, meal, maal & meal
You may have read the above and thought to yourself that meal must also be related to that other meal, when we eat something. The Dutch maal(tijd) is awfully similar as well, after all. Meal as in the old-fashioned word for flour (now only seen in words like oatmeal or cornmeal) is related to the Dutch word meel, and meal as in an occasion of taking in food is related to the Dutch word maal. But are they also related to each other?
The surprising answer is: no. Going all the way back to proto-Germanic, meal and maal are related to *mela-, which meant time, occasion (think of etmaal, nogmaals), and meal and meel go back to *melwa- which meant to grind (think of malen).
This will also be surprising to many English speakers who assume that oatmeal is so called because it is a meal, i.e. something to eat. But no, it is called oatmeal because it has been ground from oats! (Overall source here, source for *melwa- here.)
Untranslatable Dutch
Nothing is truly untranslatable; if there were such a thing, then any work of literature containing such a word would have to remain untranslated. And yet we translators always find a way ;-) However, there are some Dutch words and expressions that give translators a headache, because English just doesn’t have the same concept.
gunnen
People always talk about gezellig, but my favourite untranslatable Dutch word is gunnen. You want someone to have something good, because you like them, because you think they deserve it. You gun it them. There is no English equivalent.
Funnily enough, English does have a word for the opposite, misgunnen: begrudge. What does that say about us English speakers, I wonder? It does mean, however, that a sentence like “Je moet hem zijn verdriet gunnen” can be translated into the beautiful “Don’t begrudge him his grief”.
Dictionaries give the translation “to grant”, which only works in a few rare cases, such as “gun jezelf een beetje rust” - “Grant yourself some peace and quiet”.
“Ik gun het je van harte” can be translated with the well-known English phrase “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer person!” And a phrase I am hearing more and more from young English speakers is “I love that for you!”, which I feel also comes close.
One important nuance that none of these translations have is that the person who does the gunnen feels just a little bit good about themselves for doing it. It feels a bit benevolent. I have not been able to come up with a translation that includes that aspect of it.
A whole long table of gunnen in different contexts and the translations that I came up with can be found here.
de gunfactor
Even worse than gunnen is de gunfactor. When it comes to gunnen, I feel like I am able to find acceptable translations in most contexts, but for gunfactor I’m not so sure. Goodwill factor is a term that comes very close, but because it is not a standard phrase in English, I am not sure if it would always be understood correctly.
Take sentences such as “They accepted my bid for the house. I was actually too late, but I had the goodwill factor.” or “That football player has the goodwill factor”. I worry English speakers wouldn’t understand.
English does have the similar phrase likeability factor, which comes close in meaning, but it isn’t the same. The gunfactor isn’t just about liking people, but about thinking they deserve something. And, again, about feeling a bit noble and self-sacrificing in giving it to them.
As a translator, I usually end up describing it. “They accepted my bid for the house. I was actually too late, but they liked me and wanted me to have it.” Ugh. More bad translations here, and a screenshot of a real English online article that decided to translate gunfactor as “gun factor”.
Funny Dutch
Literally translating Dutch expressions into English is a pastime that many people enjoy and which has also made a few people a lot of money. But how do you translate the Dutch expressions into English properly? That’s where I come in!
oh, on that bicycle!
“Oh, op die fiets” is a great Dutch expression that Dutch speakers like to translate with “oh, in that way”. This sounds unnatural in English, however. Instead, what we say is “oh, now I get it!” or “ah, now it all makes sense!”. More here.
my bike has fast binders
Snelbinders are not “fast binders” in English, but choosing what to call them in English instead can be tricky, because the actual translation “bungee cords” is a term that not all, and perhaps not even many, English speakers will know, for the simple reason that most English speakers don’t use them.
I recommend the translation “elastic bike straps” or “elastic luggage straps”. I feel that these are terms that people will understand. The second is also the term that HEMA chooses on its packaging, and HEMA has excellent English translations, really top-notch.
(Translation tip: if you need an English translation for an everyday item, see if you can find a picture of the HEMA packaging online. They have five languages on there. I don’t know about the German, French or Spanish, but the English translation is almost always one that I love.)
More on snelbinders here, including a picture of a bungee cord, which is not quite the same as most Dutch snelbinders.
bakfiets
Though the correct translation is cargo bike, some English speakers are saying bakfiets in English to refer specifically to the kind of cargo bike that has a crate at the front, because e.g. a longtail (with a small wheel at the back creating room to put two children or a crate behind you) is a cargo bike, but not a bakfiets Especially the hipster English sepakers, that are completely into cargo bikes. (Disclaimer: my article about it is from 2022 and I have not checked what has happened since. But the article does include proof, in case you don’t believe me.)
Podcast tips
Man met de Microfoon - In Sheffield
Since discovering its existence two months ago, I have become a huge fan of the podcast Man met de Microfoon. Chris Bajema makes charming weekly reports on his life and the things and people around him that he finds interesting. The podcast is a real treat for me because Chris is currently living in Sheffield, England, with his partner, author and performer Paulien Cornelisse, and their young son. I have binged every episode he has made in Sheffield and am looking forward to more!
In case you don’t have the time to binge them all like I did, my special recommendations are Sheffield 8, in which Chris and Paulien re-watch The Full Monty (set in Sheffield!), Sheffield 13, in which Lauren from the UK (who I would love to have a cup of tea with!) talks about her work at the Dutch embassy and about cultural differences between the two countries, and Sheffield 9 & 15, which discuss how Dutch is taught in the UK. I also really enjoyed all the early episodes where Chris and Paulien get used to the crazy ways of doing things in the UK; the fact that they have a school-aged child makes it all even more interesting.
Over Taal Gesproken
The podcast Over Taal Gesproken is made by Onze Taal and the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. Most episodes are interviews with academics in the field of Dutch linguistics, which may sound like it might get boring, but the interviewers are very good at keeping the podcast understandable and interesting.
For me as an etymology-enthusiast the most recent episode was a delight as the interviewee was Yoïn van Spijk, who is probably the Netherlands’ biggest etymology-social-media-influencer. We also heard from Nicoline van der Sijs, who is the Netherlands’ biggest etymology-everything.
Fiat Lex
With two Dutch-language podcasts I thought I should add a tip for an English one. I actually made a list of 55 English podcasts about language last year, so I went back to it, and decided that the podcast that would probably be most interesting to the word-minded audience of this newsletter would be Fiat Lex, made by two lexicographers (that’s the fancy word for dictionary-writers). It is all about how dictionaries get made and how words work. Only one season was made, back in 2018, but it is great fun and still relevant today. Kory Stamper and Steve Kleinedler are funny, articulate and insightful, and the podcast is cleanly edited.
Quiz answers
In a land far away, a drake sat by the edge of a village, breathing fire at anyone who came near.
What are they trying to say? - In een land hier ver vandaan zat een draak aan de rand van een dorp en spuwde vuur naar iedereen die in de buurt kwam.
What does the English speaker understand? - In een land hier ver vandaan zat een mannetjeseend aan de rand van een dorp en spuwde vuur naar iedereen die in de buurt kwam.
How should they have worded it? - In a land far away, a dragon sat by the edge of a village, breathing fire at anyone who came near.
The normal word for “draak” is dragon. A drake is a male duck; often taken to mean a male mallard, one of those really common ducks with the green heads.
However, “drake” used to also mean dragon, and English-speaking fantasy writers have therefore been using the word to mean “dragon” a lot, too. So, if you saw nothing wrong with the sentence, you may have spent a lot of your time playing fantasy computer or role-playing games. For regular English speakers, however, “drake” really only means a duck (or a Canadian rapper!), and the sentence sounds pretty funny.
More information, also on why the rapper was named after a duck (he wasn’t), here.
The middle-aged village was in turmoil. They needed a hero!
What are they trying to say? - Het middeleeuwse dorp verkeerde in grote beroering. Ze hadden een held nodig!
What does the English speaker understand? - Het dorp van middelbare leeftijd verkeerde in grote beroering. Ze hadden een held nodig!
How should they have worded it? - The medieval village was in turmoil. They needed a hero!
It makes so much sense to people who speak English as a second language: if the time period is the middle ages, then surely the adjective must be middle-aged? But no, middle-aged means you are between 40 and 60 years old. Medieval is the word to choose.
More information, including a little rant about how the spelling mediaeval makes you sound pretentious, here.
A brave knight approached the monster, but the beast bit off his underarm!
What are they trying to say? - Een dappere ridder naderde het monster, maar het beest beet zijn onderarm eraf!
What does the English speaker understand? - Een dappere ridder naderde het monster, maar het beest beet zijn oksel eraf!
How should they have worded it? - A brave knight approached the monster, but the beast bit off his forearm!
The underarm, for an English speaker, is the bit of your arm that is underneath the shoulder. Arguably, it involves a bit more of the arm than just the armpit, but “oksel” is still the best translation because there is no broader term in Dutch. And anyway, the armpit is what most English speakers will think of. The bit of your arm that is between your hand and your elbow is, in English, called the forearm.
More information, including my theory on how deodorant advertising has changed the English perception of the word underarm, here.
Picture:
Pride comes before a fall
Hoogmoed komt voor de val
And finally…
And finally, a silly joke, funny video or interesting picture that I found on the Internet, that has something to do with Dutch and English.
Source: Toos en Henk by Paul Kusters
(In case you don’t get it: a koffie verkeerd is a coffee with lots of warm milk, a standard beverage in any Dutch café.)
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I love this! Thanks for the podcast links. (en rechts)
Great example of edutainment: I know more about English and Dutch now, and I had a whale of a time in the meanwhile.