Dunglish

If I remember correctly, this precious photo was taken in Belgium. Some nice person sent it to me and I can’t find their e-mail. I recently switched e-mail programmes and it was a casualty.

I’m still tyring to guess what ‘T. Ca’ is/are. Telephone cards? Telecom cards? And then to have ‘voeding’ (often Dutch for ‘pet food’, ‘food products’ or ‘power source’, although I smell a literal translation of ‘food’) and ‘food’ together is weird. This is a real multiculti sign, but not a good one.

And if I’m not mistaken, it should be ‘drank’ in Dutch (singular) and not ‘dranken’ (plural), but you folks know better.

(Photo: Can’t find your mail, mail me and I’ll add it!)

Even though Schiphol Airport has been praised for its English signage, the shops at the airport do not always follow suit. I guess if you sell flowers at the airport and they sell well, communicating with the millions of non-Dutch speakers that buy your flowers is not important.

This obviously irritated one Dutch person (Hans) who surely knows better.

Does ‘as long as we understand what they mean, it doesn’t matter’ apply here? Would someone from, say, Japan or Senegal understand this with a limited knowledge of English? And if it really doesn’t matter, why put up a Dunglish sign at all? Why not let the flowers sell themselves?

(Photo: Hans)

There is a toilet theme running through this site! Bathrooms, restrooms, WCs and toilets are indeed different in the Netherlands than in other places around the world. The English is OK, but the Dutch thought of filling the entire toilet with paper is the clincher. The Dutch just says not to throw toilet paper in the toilet. I would have thought that very odd considering it’s toilet paper, but after my summer vacation in Crete where toilets clog up easily and toilet paper goes in the garbage, my world view got that much bigger.

Is the toilet half full or half empty when there’s paper in it?

(Photo: Yuri)

I have a cold. I hope to be back to normal in a few days. That’s why I have been writing…

Dunglish has been quoted by a Ph.D. student!

Since I keep repeating that the Dutch criticise their own countrymen about the use and misuse of English (I’m like their message board, really), here is a Dutch article on a Ph.D. thesis which basically says that:

- North Americans are the most irritated by Dutch people’s broken English.
Survey says.
- The accent of the native English speaker influences how they perceive certain Dutch pronunciations.
It must be true.
- North Americans picked up less on the mistakes, but were more irritated.
And apparently this was a “surprising conclusion”.
- The most irritating mistakes were stress at the wrong place in words.
Someone I know mispronounced “catastrophe” the other day and I had to say something.
- The Dutch had their mistakes explained to them, which they apparently underestimated.
I hear this often. I still don’t get why Dutch people teach English to Dutch people.
- Pronunciation differences between Dutch and English is not a priority in the educational system.
They can’t even find enough teachers for school children here!

There is a Dutch quiz show called Question sign instead of Question mark.

Postbus 51 is a girl. It won a usability award, but apparently text eventually became unimportant:

“Less than a year later, it launched it’s first website, with an email information service. The site was completely restyled in 2002. In 2002 Postbus 51 won the Usability award assigned by 2C Communication Technology. Now three years later Postbus 51 has improved her website.”

And then a nice, intellectual bit about new words:

“Today, the influence of English is so strong that it has resulted in the creation of new words that look English, but do not really exist in that language. An example is the word mainport for a major international airfield. (The correct English word is hub.) Sometimes, the spelling of words is changed (e.g., the Nijenrode University now calls itself Nyenrode), and even the word order is changing. The word echter (however) used to be placed at the beginning of a sentence, but is now often placed after the subject, as in ‘Varieties, however, abound.’ It is interesting to note that the captains of industry, who in the 1920’s introduced English expressions to impress others, have in the 1990’s reverted to a studied purism, including, once again, the difference between masculine and feminine words. Everyone uses those English expressions now, after all.”