That’ll be lovely
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!)
December 1st, 2006 at 1:35 pm
‘Dranken’ to me sounds like it could be correct Flemish. Are there Flemish Dunglish fans? They could settle this issue…
December 2nd, 2006 at 4:28 pm
I’m a Flemish Dunglish fan living in the Netherlands, so I’ll offer my two cents on this. In this case I guess ‘drank’ would sound more like beer and spirits, whereas ‘dranken’ sounds more like soft drinks and mineral water. But given the overall shabbiness of this sign I wouldn’t be amazed if the author was just clueless.
I simply *adore* the general DIY feeling to this sign! The spacing between the characters is bad and they clearly misjudged the space they needed for the words. They probably never even bothered to lay out the adhesive letters before sticking them on.
December 4th, 2006 at 11:04 pm
I’m a Flemish Dunglish fan also, and I agree with Fritz. ‘Drank’ would mean beer and up, alcoholwise. ‘Dranken’ would mean anything liquid you can pour into yourself: alcoholic beverages, coffee, soft drinks, milk, whatever.
But I’m pretty sure the nuance was lost on the person concocting the sign.
December 15th, 2006 at 12:11 am
“Drank” means “booze,” “dranken” means “drinks”. If you’ve got a “drankprobleem,” you’ve got a drinking problem; if you’ve got a “drankenprobleem,” you’re a medical curiosity.
The real problem is with “voeding winkel,” which should be “voedingswinkel,” or perhaps “voedingwinkel,” but at least spelled as one word.
(My apologies for the excessive use of commas — I don’t know where they go, and I cannot be bothered to look it up.)
December 24th, 2006 at 3:54 pm
“(My apologies for the excessive use of commas — I don’t know where they go, and I cannot be bothered to look it up.)”
You lazy sob 😉