The Dutch are a pragmatic lot, and considering the language's relative paucity in vocabulary it's common practice to adopt and naturalize loanwords from the countries around this staunch little nation, and those with whom we share dubious cultural connections from the colonial era. We say weekend, babysitter, sixpack and deal without a second thought.
The Flemish in neighboring Belgium actually speak a far purer form of Dutch, choosing to construct new words like the Germans: a droogzwierder is a clothes dryer (we borrowed the French centrifuge) and means literally dry-slinger. While this (to us) curious vocabulary, coupled with the gentle lilt of the Flemish dialect, causes us to see them as our mild-mannered and provincial southern neighbors, I'm feeling more and more like they have the right idea.
I'm all for the evolution of language. New ideas need new words; a changing vocabulary changes the collective body of thought (gedachtengoed, one of the best Dutch words) and means that people are thinking about new things. I'm even tolerant of certain deteriorations of established language; recently I had a discussion with friends on Twitter about the mutation of certain idioms (chomping at the bit instead of champing, all the sudden instead of all of a sudden) and I posited that there comes a point where so many people are saying a particular phrase wrong, that by consensus, that becomes how you say it. I could care less is so rapidly dominating the original and more logical phrase I couldn't care less that this argument can soon be made, and when I'm convinced it's happened I'll put my money where my mouth is and say the nonsensical new version in conversation.
But then there is geüpdatet.
The past perfect tense of regular verbs in Dutch typically get the prefix ge- and see their root modified according to some fairly organic rules of pronunciation. Ik hoor means I hear, and ik heb gehoord means I have heard. We do this with loanwords as well. Further, since eu is a unique vowel in Dutch (and totally unpronouncable to English-speakers) in cases where the e and u must cohabitate but be pronounced separately, we use an umlaut to indicate that the u is a distinct phoneme.
Updaten has been absorbed, ever so pragmatically, into Dutch, but the past perfect tense -- which has been accepted by the dictionary authorities -- is this horrific mongrel of language laws that are wholly incompatible with the word in question. The ge- prefix I can just about understand, but the -t at the end? Clearly it's an issue of the ear, with English past tense updated sounding so natural that a Dutch writer wants to replicate it -- but since we're adopting the word, it should have a suffix in line with our spelling. What's worse nobody ever pronounced the -t when saying the word.
There is a solution, though. Dutch and English are so similar in their origin that, really, we should be able to treat update lexically like we treat similar Dutch verbs which intrinsically include a preposition: up and date can be treated like distinct components of the verb. There's a handy dandy precedent in the phrase up to date, so This doesn't exactly solve the issue of a very inelegantly incorporated loan word, but it does at least mitigate the ugliness somewhat.
I'd like to take this opportunity to propose this superior alternative.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:
Upgedate.
- Alex F. Vance
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