I once saw an episode of the BBC program 'All Things British' (wherein former Action Transvestite Eddie Izzard traces the foreign roots of various aspects of British culture) that dealt with the English language and its origins on the mainland. I'll get back to that in a bit.
The remaining influence of the Roman invasion of the island then known as Albion, and later the Norman and Saxon occupations left a hodgepodge of a language that, really, has far too many words. For example: royal (related to French 'roi'), kingly (related to German 'König') and regal (related to Latin 'rex') all mean the same thing!
Dutch is the closest living relative to English. I grew up Dutch-English bilingual, and we learn German and French in high school here, so when I first read the Canterbury tales it felt as if I were Harry Potter and realized I could enderstand snakes. If I turned my head like this, closed oned eye, squinted the other and bit my tongue just right, I could easily parse eighty percent of any passage. The biggest help was that the rhyming scheme could inform me how a word was expected to be pronounced, which allowed me to pick the language it most probably sourced.
Here's the first lines: <!--more-->
Wan, that April, with his shores sooth,
The droghte of March, hat perched to the rote,
(note that these are not the officially correct lines; this is how they appeared in the version I read)
Soothing shores don't make much sense for April, but March reveals himself more clearly. A dry month, parched to the root... and if that's how they pronounced rote, then maybe sooth sounded more like soot. If you then guess that this is cognate to Dutch zoet, meaning sweet, then shores makes sense as showers. Sweet April showers? That's imagery that survives to this day. And droghte is so clearly related to Dutch droogte that it didn't occur to me until later that it might have been pronounced drought.
There was a lot of guesswork and likely a lot of false friendship, but it was a fascinating experience that greatly informed how I perceive the cultures of the world as intertwining threads of a single fabric. Most curious of course are the nonsensical frays and knots, like Finnish and Hungarian (the Finno-Ugric isolates) which don't connect to anything.
Anyway, Eddie Izzard. In this episode of All Thing British he went down to Oxbridge of Camford or some such to take a crash course in Middle English (despite what the above tree would have you believe, Middle Dutch and Middle English still had quite a few linguistic dalliances) to learn conversational and mercantile phrases. On a plane he hopped and arrived at Schiphol airport, the zenith of my daily commute, after which he traveled north, to that strange province of Friesland.
In Friesland they speak Frys, a language ostensibly related to Dutch but so alien that we can't understand each other, under most circumstances. The Frysian populace actually campaigned for quite a few decades to have Frys reclassified as a language on its own right rather than merely a Dutch dialect.
So our Eddie goes up to a Frysian farmer and uses his Middle English to try and purchase a cow... and amazingly, succeeds. Quick-witted, he observed the patient farmer's responses and figured out how the patterns of his phrases connected to the patterns of Frys -- for instance, the Middle English for cow is pronounced more like kew whereas the Frys actually sounds completely like the modern English cow.
And so he spent the rest of the episode followed by an inquisitive calf on a rope.
Based on my background in linguistics, I'm not too impressed with the chart. However, I love the story about buying a Friesian cow while speaking Middle English. Sounds somewhat plausible, though what I'd really like is to take a Yorkshireman or a Scotsman with the real auld regional speech and send him back in a Tardis to talk with Chaucer. I fully expect they'd get along quite well.What needs to be taken into account is the fact that Middle English itself was not a single language, but a collection of regional dialects. Those dialects were even more diverse than the present wide range of pronunciation and syntax that is observable in Britain. Because writers spelled as they spoke, the spellings were all over the map as well.Even so, I love Middle English almost as much as I love Anglo-Saxon. Chaucer is magnificent, and so is Shakespeare's early modern English.As for English having "too many words" I say "Fie on you, O laggard that thou art." The rich vocabulary of English is one of the big factors in our grand poetry and superb prose. The fact that the language keeps absorbing huge quantities of vocabulary from other cultures is nothing but a continuing contribution to that power.
ReplyDeleteI'm just jealous, is all. Even for a Germanic language, the tiny size of the Dutch vocabulary is staggering. It's a merchant's language, a farmer's language, very solid and firm in meaning, but lacking much in the way of subtlety. Something that is pretty, or beautiful, or handsome, or gorgeous, or even fortuitous is simply mooi in Dutch, and it's my belief that this paucity of nuance has directly informed the Dutch collective spirit, where sobriety is one of the chief virtues. Name a Dutch merchant, or businessman, an engineer, a physicist or artist, this isn't an insurmountable challenge. Try, however, to think of a Dutch philosopher who's made an impact on the world...
ReplyDeleteI don't think much of philosophy in general, at least not after Plato. I'm afraid when I think of philosophers all I can conjure up is Magicthise and Vroomfondel making idiots of themselves with the Deep Thought computer in Hitchhiker's Guide. Come to think of it, doesn't Vroomfondel have a pretty Dutch-sounding ring to it?Your nation has given us some of the finest artists the world has ever known. You already mentioned contributions to science, engineering, and navigation. It seems to me there was quite a distinct influence on English history, even to the point of putting monarchs on the British throne. Something called the House of Orange, no? Even among the uneducated, Dutch expertise in confectionary (chocolate mainly) and horticulture (tulips and their relatives) have kept you on the map. Don't belittle such a fine and durable tradition; it's a fine place to start.
ReplyDeleteI'm proud of my nation! Somewhat conflicted by my Indonesian heritage and the complexities of colonial history, but there's plenty to be proud of. However, with sobriety, objectivity and clarity being principal Dutch virtues, I'm just as aware of the deficiencies, limitations and handicaps of this part of my cultural background. There's no shame in it, different peoples are just different, principles of equality notwithstanding, and I deeply appreciate the staggering diversity in our species. Different races have different bodies -- Asians like myself, with our long hamstrings and Achilles' tendons, can easily do the rice-paddy squat without practice, while Westerners are typically as wobbly as new foals when they first try it. Indo halfbloods like myself grow tall when we're raised on starch- and protein-rich Western diets. Blacks have stronger, heavier skeletons and have a generally greater aptitude for endurance-based athletics. Whites can synthesize adequate levels of vitamin D even in sun-poor environments, and those of European descent have a higher tolerance for alcohol than pretty much anyone else in the world. And just because our vocabulary is small doesn't mean we're deficient in communication. We all learn English, and most of us French and German, so from a young age we're aware of other forms of though than those we grew up with. What we lack in distinct words we make up for in idiom; the more sophisticated and narrative styles of writing are littered with expressions that don't literally mean all too much, but carry a great deal of nuanced significance. While the language doesn't produce many great philosophers (though Descartes did write his seminal work while in the Netherlands, quite a hilarious story I should really relate to you on another occasion) we do have some truly great comedy. We have tons of homonyms and homophones to play with, and the brevity of most Dutch words means that comedic poetry can be crafted for the most delightful meter and rhythm. Here's one of my favorites, with a liberal translation I crafted in my teens, which I still feel very ably carrie the melancholy yet playful tone of the verse: Ik zit mij voor het vensterglas onnoemelijk te vervelen, Ik wou dat ik twee hondjes was, dan kon ik samen spelen. Sitting at the window-sill, observing stormy weather, I wish I were two puppy-dogs, so I could play together.
ReplyDeleteDutch idiom is some of the most brilliant use of common words I've ever encountered, actually.And thanks for the "doggerel." It's a tribute to my Middle English teachers that I could make it out even before looking at your translation. Only "vervelen" was a stumper for me.My first inclination was to translate the last line as "Then I could play with myself" and of course that makes a double entendre in English idiom. Would the same apply in Dutch?
ReplyDeleteIt would, but it wouldn't be funny! There's no specific emotional charge to masturbation in Dutch culture. It's not shameful or even naughty, it's just a private thing like scratching or athlete's foot. And to gain the double entendre, you'd have to lose the tender hope for companionship in the mournful, solitary verse, too! I'm impressed that you could parse it! That "vervelen" should stump you was curious at first (I'd have guessed "onnoemelijk") but it makes sense since tis pronunciation is kind of a need-to-know thing. "Wervelen", meaning more or less "to whirl", is pronounced differently, with the emphasis on the first syllable, where the vowel is flat, while the others are mumbled. In "Vervelen" the first and last syllables are mumbled while the second is emphasized and the vowel is long. During the second world war, one method the scattered Dutch resistance cells would use to identify themselves to each other and prevent infiltration by German spies was to show the suspect a piece of paper on which was written the name of a city, whose pronunciation simply couldn't be predicted without knowing. When faced with "Enschede" the Germans would uniformly guess EN-shay-duh instead of the correct but illogical en-sghuh-DAY. Who'd guess that "Gorinchem" should be pronounced as "Ghorkum"?
ReplyDeleteA common trait between Dutch and English, then. Who'd guess that "Worcester" is pronounced "WOOSter" or "WUSter"? Or that "Lancastershire" is "LANkasher"?You're correct about "vervelen." I'd figured the initial V for a W sound, but didn't guess the accent. As for "onnoemelijk" I actually made it "bothered" or "unnerved" but that worked well enough. And here I discover that my English typing fingers have difficulty doing that "-ijk" sequence. ;p It took three tries, unusual for me.
ReplyDeleteNo no, correction, it's the other way around: V is always V in Dutch, and W is also like english V, just a teensie bit more tender. Both are vocalized and thus distinct from F, but most people put enough breath behind the V that it's indistinguishable from F. This isn't a problem because there aren't many words that could be misinterpreted. One exception comes to mind, from Dutch cabaretier Herman Finkers, who produced a hilarious cartoon version of MacBeth which included a fairy godmother. The Dutch for fairy is fee while vee is cattle, so this lady travelled on a carriage marked fee vervoer :) -ijk is a tricky one for English-speakers (Buck Hopper remarked on that when I mentioned a Dutch name to him once, claiming that I and J have no business together). IJ is a compound vowel, and homophonous to EI, though it's distinct from English I and German EI. EI and UI are the markers that allow us to identify non-natives; even if their accent is perfect, it's a rare foreigner who ever masters those sounds. Some of the shortest words in Dutch vocabulary are ei meaning egg and ui meaning onion, and in some dialects the sounds are so similar that it's become a joke: Ik wil een broodje ei met ui; niet te veel ui anders proef je de ei niet meer. (I want an egg sandwich with onion, not too much onion or you can't taste the egg any more) The gag there is that it's de ui but het ei and mixing those makes it doubly confusing :)
ReplyDelete[grin here] I accept correction, or at least clarification. Obviously I know about as much Dutch as you could fit on the head of a pin using a 36 point font. It always surprises me how close to the correct meaning I can get if I stare at it and try to imagine it being pronounced, or rather more probably mispronounced, by someone with a Low German accent (or for that matter, Yiddish.) Much of the vocabulary has cognates in English, but the spelling does look more like Middle English.I'd probably have more luck trying to buy a calf in Sweden by speaking Latin for all the Dutch I could muster.
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