English and the Dutch

Category: list

  • Weird stuff that Dutch speakers are famous for on social media

    Weird thing #1 – eating their prime minister

    From the super-reliable sounding Facebook group “History Cool Kids”

    In 1672, during a major crisis in the Netherlands, a mob captured and executed the former leading statesman Johan de Witt (who was effectively serving as prime minister). He was then partially eaten by the mob.

    Under his leadership, though not because of his personal failures, the Dutch Republic was attacked simultaneously by England, France, and the German states of Prince-Bishopric of Münster and Electorate of Cologne during the Franco Dutch War. Although the Dutch ultimately survived the invasion, the year became known as the Disaster Year because of the scale of military and political collapse.

    The violence was also tied to internal political rivalry, and some contemporaries and later historians have suspected the influence of William III of England, then Prince of Orange, who benefited politically from the crisis and rose to power as stadtholder before later invading England in 1688 and becoming king.

    The aftermath was famously depicted in a painting by Jan de Baen, and many Dutch historians still regard Johan de Witt as one of the greatest statesmen in the country’s history, which makes the episode especially tragic. 

    And you can apparently see his tongue and finger in The Hague:

  • My collection of proof that “clothes” rhymes with “nose”

    I’m not sure why it is, and I am worried that Dutch secondary school English teachers are to blame, but lots of Dutch people completely mispronounce the word “clothes”. They say something like “clothe-ese”.

    Though one of the main principles of this blog is that having a Dutch accent is okay, in this case this pronunciation doesn’t work because it will lead to misunderstandings.

    Also, the solution is so easy: “clothes” rhymes with “nose”. Don’t believe me? Listen to Avril Lavigne

    “All of her friends, they stuck up their nose, they had a problem with his baggy clothes.”

    Or look at this Simpsons quote:

    Or click through these 25372 videos on YouGlish. (Don’t worry, just clicking through the first ten or so is fine.)

    Or look at this meme:

    But I asked a native speaker and they said it was “cloath-zzzz”

    If you ask a native speaker about their language, they are going to want to be helpful and tell you what they feel is the “correct” pronunciation. So they’ll think about the spelling and pronounce it slowly for you, and then they will indeed end up pronouncing the “th” in the middle (as a voiced th, by the way, as in “them”).

    But when native speakers are just talking and not thinking about it, they’ll say “I bought some new close.” I promise. Unfortunately, most people don’t realise how they actually talk, so if you ask them they might insist that they always pronounce the “th”. People are funny that way.

    Heddwen Newton is an English teacher and a translator from Dutch into English. She thinks about languages way too much, for example about how strange it is that these little blurb things are written in the third person.

    Heddwen has two children, two passports, two smartphones, two arms, two legs, and two email newsletters.

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