Dunglish

I recently participated in a 5 km run for the first time and the folks who organised the event are now free to send me e-mail about upcoming events. This squash event has a funny yet questionable catch phrase, “show us some balls”.

First, this is obviously aimed at the Dutch – fine. No mistakes, great, no actual Dunglish.

However, I find this cheesy in a bad way. I love cheesy, but this is borderline. It could just be me. Sure I chuckled, but as a woman, I don’t like it much in the same way I don’t like e-mails about business events that suggest I should loosen my tie and dress casual. That sort of thing.

I would like to know what you think!

This was taken in a supermarket in Utrecht, a city swarming with students and conference-goers where I imagine tons of people speak some English. This wonderful sign is of course tough to understand. You get to imagine a Chinese tourist trying to sort this out instead of a Brit. They could have simply left it in Dutch.

‘Borrelshop’ means absolutely nothing unless the person has some rudiments of Dutch. Liquour shop, booze corner, drinks & stuff, please give us something with a clue. That was sarcasm.

‘These is usual opened’ deserves an entire paragraph of explaining, but do I have to?

‘Report this’, report what? It sounds like a police station. I’ll pass.

Being a fan of shameless plugs and all, allow me to point you to a serious article I wrote in Dutch (don’t get too excited it was corrected by a real pro) about small Dutch businesses communicating in English.

(Photo: Erik)

It’s just a beginning, but I plan to put lots of pics on Flickr in the near future. Over the years I’ve done my best to post some fun stuff. Now, it’s time to share. I started uploading photos to Flickr I took myself and that I used on Dunglish. Most of these will be posted using a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons license.

UPDATE: Good idea, I will make it a group soon, let me learn how to use Flickr properly first!

So join me on Flickr: Dunglish on Flickr.

The great guys over at Taalpuristen did a post on a hair salon, which has a wonderful Dunglish mistake in it, never mind the really ‘lathered up’ bad Dutch according to them. ‘Totally Hair & Beauty’ is just plain wrong because the Dutch adjective ‘totaal’ (’total’) was turned into the adverb ‘totally’. And the Dutch adverb for ‘totally’ is ‘totaal’. Dutch adjectives and adverbs work that way. Depending on where the word is in a sentence, it’s either an adjective or an adverb. I remember struggling with that myself.

My point is it needed to be an adjective. Using what you think is a posh English name and mess it up is kinda dumb.

It’s hard to believe that someone would make this mistake in this day and age, but they did. Let us all admire this wonderful mishap, have a good laugh and send it ’round the Internet.

Speaking of which I plan to open up a Dunglish Flickr account to share and give back, and one of these days I will be finished with adding all the tags to previous postings.

(Photo: Yuri)