Why are "dier" and "deer" so alike? 🦌 How do you translate "een bord voor je kop"? 🍽️ Those poor ants! 🐜

Feb 08, 2023

Welcome to English and the Dutch, the newsletter with tips and tricks, fun facts, new translations and other good stuff about, well, English and the Dutch. In your inbox every second Wednesday.

The newsletter is written by me, Heddwen Newton. I also own the website www.hoezegjeinhetEngels.nl. If you are wondering, where did I sign 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 by pressing this button right here:

Quiz

Can you spot the mistakes in the sentences below?

Please join our writer’s room next week.

My cat is very playfull.

I’ve put my holiday in my agenda.

The girl, who was wearing her favorite gray face mask, frowned at me.

In the picture below, what would be a better thing to say?

Answers below!

Fun fact

Ever wondered why the English word “deer” and the Dutch word “dier” sound so alike?

The word “deer” used to refer to animals in general, just like it still does for the Dutch. But because the brown, hoofed, forest mammal was the most prized by hunters, the word “deer” came to refer to only that species of animal. If you were hunting for “deer”, that’s what you were hunting for.

You might recognise the old-English name for deer: “hart”

(Learned from The History of English Podcast episode On the Hunt)

Dutch/English in the news

Tiny village of Ommeren is global news

A treasure map from an archive has catapulted Ommeren, a small village between Tiel and Veenendaal, onto the world stage. The New York Times wrote an excellent article about it, and the one from the Daily Mail has lots of pictures.

Tom Hanks does a terrible Dutch accent (apparently)

Tom Hanks will probably be getting a “Razzie” (like an Oscar, but for a bad performance instead of a good one) for his terrible Dutch accent in the Film Elvis.

I actually thought his accent was pretty decent in the trailer, and I even wrote a little article about it last year. I haven’t seen the film, though, so I can’t comment on his accent there.

English loanwords in Dutch

Nicoline van der Sijs is a linguist who writes about Dutch borrowing from English and English borrowing from Dutch (do check out the link, the whole book is open access!).

She recently wrote a piece in Onze Taal about the increase of English loanwords in Dutch, as illustrated by the below graph. Fun extra: if you manage to mark all the English loanwords she uses in the article, you get a free book :-)

English speakers want “voorpret”

Our word “voorpret” made it into Dictionary.com’s list of 12 Emotional Words We Should Have In English.

I wrote an article about “voorpret” in July 2022 in which I decided that “planning is half the fun” might be a good expression to use for this untranslatable Dutch word.

New translations

I post a new translation on hoezegjeinhetEngels.nl every day. For this newsletter, I choose a few recent ones that I am proud of.

Blokfluit

The usually wooden flute with a whistle mouthpiece that you probably played when you were little is, confusingly, called a recorder in English. On my site, I explain why this is confusing, and how it came to be.

Wie zwijgt, stemt toe

The sentiment that silence implies consent is one that is not heard in English very often. It is as old as Plato, but simply not very well-known in English.

I wonder if it is the Dutch habit of being forthright and efficient that has created the difference? Us Dutchies want to get on with things, so we are quicker to say “well, silence gives consent, so that’s that, decision made!”

Just a theory!

Een bord voor je kop hebben

This one took quite a bit of creativity. I give a lot of translation options, but I am secretly happiest with “to have zero emotional awareness”.

This article also features a picture of my better half holding a plate in front of his head :-)

Jezelf in de weg zitten

A reader request. I found a nice modern phrase for this one, as well: to self-sabotage. Lots of other options in the article, though!

New to the site: a random button

I have implemented a “random” button at the bottom of each article that will take you to another article randomly. Disadvantage: it will also take you to old articles from when I was still a newbie blogger. If you find anything too embarrassing, just click the button again!

Quiz answers

Please join our writers’ room next week.

A writer’s room would be a room for just one writer. Because there will be more than one writer, the word you need is “writers”, not “writer”. To put “writers” in the possessive form, you add an apostrophe: “writers’ room”. Read more here.

My cat is very playful.

The word “full” (=vol) is spelled with two l’s in English. Any other word ending with “ful”, like “wonderful”, “successful” or “playful” only gets one l. Read more here.

I’ve put our appointment in my calendar.

“Agenda” is a false friend. In British English, the word “agenda” only refers to the talking points set before a meeting. (American English does sometimes use “agenda” to mean appointment book, which is why I used the word “holiday” instead of “vacation”.)

The little book called an “agenda” in Dutch is referred to as an appointment book, a planner, or (British, and slightly outdated by now) a diary. “Calendar” is the safest option, because everybody will understand it, and because the electronic appointment planners you most likely use at work are called “calendars”. Read more here.

The girl, wearing her favorite gray face mask, scowled at me.

I put this one in for the advanced English speakers among you. Even many native speakers would not notice the problem here, unless they are speakers of American English.

This sentence is in American English, you can tell by the spelling of “favorite” (UK English: “favourite”) and “gray” (UK English “grey”, though this difference is less strict).

In American English, the word “frown” refers to the mouth, not the eyebrows (hence “turn that frown upside down!”). If someone is wearing a face mask, you would not be able to see them frown. When talking about the eyebrows, an American says “scowl” or “furrow the brow”. Read more here.

Extra points

Extra points to you if you were bothered by the British word “holiday” in one sentence and the American “favorite” in the next!

Sterkte!

English speakers do not say “strength!” when someone is feeling low. Instead, you could say “I wish you all the best!” or “Take care!”

More pro-active well-wishes could be “Chin up!” (UK), “Feel better!” (US) or “Remember, every cloud has a silver lining!”

And finally…

And finally, I leave you with this Twitter user, who asked an important question:

A.Z. Foreman: serious philology, silly behavior@azforeman

How is it that both Dutch and Egyptian Arabic have an idiom that literally means “ant-fucking” used to refer to what in English is called “nitpicking”? That feels like it has to be way beyond coincidence.

Discussion about this post

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