Oppenheimer speaks lousy Dutch 🙊, but Barbie looks good on a Dutch bicycle 🚲
Very, very mild spoilers within
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 second Wednesday. (Or every third Wednesday during the summer holidays.)
The newsletter is written by me, Heddwen Newton. I also own the website www.hoezegjeinhetEngels.nl. If you are wondering where you signed up for this newsletter - that’s probably where you signed up for this newsletter. And if you have not yet signed up for this newsletter, you can do so right here:
Fun fact
A topical fun fact this month!
Two highly publicised blockbuster films were both released last weekend: Barbie and Oppenheimer. This prompted the English-language press to invent the portmanteau “Barbenheimer”. People have been doing “the Barbenheimer thing”; going to one of the movies first, having a meal, and then going to the other. Fun!
That’s not the fun fact, though. The fun fact is that there is a nod to the Netherlands in both films. (Very mild spoilers ahead.)
Barbie features this little scene a few times, when the characters, for reasons I will not reveal, need to travel by bicycle. The scenes are very short, blink and you’ll miss them.
The big question is this, though: are they wearing… Lederhosen??
Oppenheimer’s nod is more extensive. The real-life J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American of German-Jewish descent. As a physicist, he lectured in Leiden for a bit in 1928, and did so in Dutch, despite having little experience with the language. This apparently impressed everyone greatly.
The film Oppenheimer uses this part of his life, and therefore includes a scene of actor Cillian Murphy speaking Dutch. Murphy did not learn Dutch to do this, but asked director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema to speak the sentences into his phone. He played and replayed the recording, slowing it down for clarity, and learned the scene phonetically.
The English media is giving him a lot of credit for this, but for Dutch speakers it seems he did such a bad job that most people didn’t even recognise their own language. They only found out it was supposed to be Dutch when the language was named in a later scene.
(Van Hoytema lives in Sweden, and has not been in the Netherlands for 20 years. I wonder if that has anything to do with it? (Update: it doesn’t, Van Hoytema speaks accentless Dutch - see the comments.) Or perhaps the speech wasn’t written by a native speaker? I’m reading reports that there were lots of German words. Perhaps Oppenheimer himself used lots of German words in 1928? Seems likely, as he would have learned German from his parents.
I have not seen the film myself yet. If you have, let me know what you thought of Murphy’s Dutch in the comments!)
Dutch/English in the news
Mark Rutte quits, and makes international headlines
Monitoring the English-language media for Dutch and Belgian news as I do, it is interesting to see which stories get picked up and which don’t. Other countries have been vaguely interested in the nitrogen crisis, but Mark Rutte announcing his departure from politics? That got some real airtime. I’ve chosen a piece from The Economist, which always has high quality writing both in form and in content.
[Mark Rutte’s] regular-guy image, equally at home in a suit or jeans and polo shirt, meshes well with Dutch culture’s odd combination of sober Calvinism and unapologetic hedonism.
Reading time: 6 minutes / The Economist (archived)
Politico predicts Flanders and Wallonia may be splitting up soon
But don’t worry, Belgium gets some news in English too this month. Except, oh, it’s not very fun news. Politico, a reputable news website about European politics, makes the case that Belgium may be breaking up soon.
Reading time: 5 minutes/ Politico
International companies in Groningen are worried about the plans to limit English at Dutch universities
Yeelen Knegtering, CEO of AI company Klippa in Groningen, makes the point that his company would not have been able to attract the international talent it needs if there had been a requirement for students to learn Dutch in order to study here, as is the current plan. He quotes three other CEOs who worry about scaring international talent away.
Reading time: 3 minutes / Ukrant
Why Dutch kids are healthier and taller
UK newspaper The Telegraph followed up from the news (featured in this newsletter last time) that Dutch children are quite a bit taller than British Children. The result is an extensive article about why Dutch children are so much healthier. Playing outside, drinking lots of milk, family meals at 6 pm and health education. Made me feel quite proud to be Dutch!
Reading time: 8 minutes/ The Telegraph
American Aldi launches Stroopwafel ice cream
Aldi in America has launched a product that is two stroopwafels with vanilla ice cream in between. A stroopwafel ice cream sandwich. The whole of America is delighted, because of course it is, hello.
Reading time: 2 minutes/ Mashed
Interview - Ype Driessen
I’m a big fan of Dutch comic artist Ype Driessen. I find his work funny, relatable and intelligent. When I read that his photo comic novel “Het Nadeel van de Twijfel” had been put onto the US and UK market in an English translation, I immediately asked him for an interview!
Here is a short excerpt; the interview itself has lots of pictures and examples, check it out!
I asked friend and translator Lenny Kouwenberg, who has also translated some of Marten Toonder’s Tom Puss comics. She made the first English version, and then I went over it and spiced it up a bit. After that, I asked an American friend to read it, and also showed it to some Dutch friends. The Dutch speakers were much more critical than the native speakers!
In my view, Dutch speakers have a lot of opinions about English-that-sounds-Dutch, and they tend to take that much too far. My Dutch proofreaders had long lists of corrections (often contradicting each other!), whereas my American friend just had one or two remarks.
Recent translations
For the first time in two years, I have given myself a break in my schedule of one post a day to my website. What can I say? Chasing two muddy children around Germany was more important. (This is also the reason there is no quiz in the newsletter today.) Still, a few new articles this month:
Waterijs
Dutch makes a distinction between ice-made-from-cream and ice-made-from-water. English does have ice cream, but when it comes to the other kind it doesn’t look at the material, but at the shape. Americans say “popsicle” and Brits say “ice lolly” for waterijs on a stick, and “freezy” or “ice pop” respectively for the kind from a tube. This opens up a big question: what is a Magnum? Can an ice lolly be made out of ice cream? The answer is nobody knows (and people have done serious research into this). Read more in the article.
Zich aangesproken voelen
If you feel aangesproken in a negative way, the translation isn’t hard. “To take offence” or “to take something personally” will usually do the trick. But when it is used in a more neutral sense, like “iedereen die zich aangesproken voelt is welkom,” the translation suddenly becomes almost impossible. More here.
Liefdesverdriet
My contact page has not been used much lately (except by spammers). The only question I got this month has a distinct summer-holiday vibe to it: liefdesverdriet. It is trickier to translate than you might think, because “to be lovesick” can also mean you want someone but can’t get them, and “to be heartbroken” can also mean your football team lost a big match. English does not have a term purely for the depression you feel when someone breaks up with you. More here.
Voordeel
I decided to republish one of my very first posts this month; I used to translate for a company that offered a discount card and the word voordeel was always there, taunting me. English doesn’t have a word that combines “benefit” and “cheap”, instead, companies market their services with slogans like “best value for money”, “hot deals” or “great bargains”. More here.
Sheet
Good news for the coming False Friend Fridays: I have gathered more pseudo-anglicisms, English-sounding words that Dutch people assume must be the same in English, but aren’t. The first one is “sheet”, in the context of a Powerpoint presentation. English speakers don’t say “sheet”, they say “slide”. A “sheet” in English is a big piece of fabric that you put on your bed. I have a theory as to where the sheet-slide difference comes from, which you can read here.
And finally…
De Speld translated famous English movie quotes into Dutch.
“De naam is Obligatie. Jan Obligatie.” More here.
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Great newsletter. VERY interesting and I like reading it.
Just caught up with this. I just watched Oppenheimer. I thought it was German until they said it was Dutch!