Dunglish

I’ve been very busy lately, let the record show. But enough of that, here’s an interesting bit from a very popular Dutch magazine, a favourite for the whole family.

Highlights:
“Over 3 million regular readers” and further down, “almost 3 million readers”.
Interesting.

“An ideal way to show your fully product range.”
I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.

The word ‘dump’ in Dutch is normally used for an ‘army and navy surplus store’ (can someone explain to me why its ‘legerdump’ in one word and ‘baby-dump’ with a hyphen? Thanks!), but its meaning here has been stretched. You could argue that the only kind of dump is an army and navy surplus store and that this store is really an outlet store, even though they apparently have 11 stores. That’s a lot of surplus.

Can ‘dump’ be used to designate anything else than army and navy stuff? The Dutch Van Dale dictionary says ‘no’. The English word ‘dump’ also means “a place (goods or stock, for example) on the market in large quantities and at a low price.” But that’s English etymology, not Dutch etymology. And English etymology cannot apply to a Dutch word, as words enter different languages in different ways. This seems to be twisting the Dutch language to suit one’s baby needs, resulting in what looks like Dunglish. It’s also good for a laugh and has shocked many native English speakers.

(Photo: Andrew)

Let’s learn about Dutch culture or let’s check what I’ve learnt. I heard Dutch comedian Howard Komproe said on telly once that one of the main ingredients of Dutch comedy was taking pleasure in other people’s misery, called ‘leedvermaak’ in Dutch. And then, there’s this Flemish girl group called K3 that is one of the biggest selling Dutch-language groups ever, known for their merchandising. And last but not least, there’s a big difference between ’sweet’ and ’sweat’. ‘Sweat dreams’ is not child-friendly, but it is funny. And then there’s judging a website by its PHP, requiring that you code switch while shopping.

(Link: Scrubs)

This was sent to me from the guys over at Taalpuristen, who felt there was something for Dunglish in this one. The advert literally says “the colours of the dessert (or pudding)”. Judging from the sandy colour, they meant to say ‘desert’. Problem is, ‘desert’ in Dutch is ‘woestijn’. There’s more wrong with this advert in Dutch, but I’ll leave that aside. It reminds of the French ‘poison du jour’ (poison of the day) instead of ‘poisson du jour’ (fish of the day), which is a common mistake and a great source of clean fun.

Speaking of clean fun, ‘dessert’ pronounced by a Dutch person with many ’ssss’, reminds me of a silly party joke, involving sex after dinner. Funny or not, that party joke popped into my mind when I read this. One thing is for sure: the person who wrote this is mixed up.

This one goes out to the retro computing crowd. This is a textbook case of what a Dutch company’s website looks like when it is trying to sound international. I’m sad, because I wish they meant what they are trying to say. The company is known internationally, and that in itself should be a reason to sound the part as well. Why the Vic 20? Well, enough people use a Macintosh when referring to computer viruses, so I went with an old Christmas present of mine.

Some highlights:
-”Out of warranty?”
Got warranty? Would have been funny.
-”To continue to derrive from those benefits”
That’s ugly.
“If your product suddenly turns-out to be out of order ”
Out you go!

When it comes to fashion, dumbing down is all the rage. Experience has taught me that Dutch women’s magazines are Dunglish mills, which is part of the overall look. I will make a mental note of checking out men’s magazine to see what that’s like these days. As a tribute to this phenomenon, here’s yet another Dutch women’s magazine that will test your code switching abilities. There’s so much English that you’d think they wanted to jump out of their Dutch shell, but there’s enough Dutch to let you know that you’re still in Europe. Part of me – the part that likes fluffy pink things but dares not wear them in public – wants to read either Dutch or English, but not this mélange.

I do hope you all are about to have a brilliant new year. I celebrated New Year’s Eve in Munich of all places, romantically located near the beautiful Olympic Stadium of the ill-fated 1972 Olympic Games. Walking around downtown Munich on New Year’s Eve in a big outdoor food market, I found me some Denglish. My first impression of a proud German city was that very little outdoor advertising was in any other language but German. The first bit is ‘ha ha’ funny because it still looks German, but the second one is just breathtaking. In both cases, the English is aimed at non-German speakers. Although the Germans I know can rattle off a list of English words that go through a German grinder and get served up like sausages to an unexpecting audience (’handy’ for mobile phone comes to mind), they seem to do it more selectively than the Dutch. Of course, this is entirely open to discussion.