The right sounds

Follow this link for a little bit of Dunglish and a lot of great Dutch mistakes.

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(Photo: Slagerij van Kampen (Pool), tip: Martijn)

17 Responses to “The right sounds”

  1. Caroline says:

    I was going to *send* you this picture, which I took yesterday. But I see you’ve already used it, eventhough it’s clearly labelled ‘all rights reserved’. As I said, I had intended to send it to you, so I obviously don’t mind it being used here, but you could have asked first. You know, common courtesy.

  2. Natashka says:

    You’re quite right. I purposely made a link to the rest of your pictures, as I think there are really good. Please forgive me for jumping the gun, as I usually do ask. It won’t happen again!

  3. Caroline says:

    OK, no problem – I’ve made the same mistake myself in the past. Those other pictures aren’t mine though – you’re linking to a Flickr pool which combines people’s pictures.

  4. Natashka says:

    Thanks, I corrected that as well 🙂

  5. Larry says:

    Even the Dutch on the side is crap: ‘Europese’ needs an initial capital, like every adjective derived from a proper noun in Dutch. Why is this such a problem for Dutch people?

  6. Natashka says:

    Larry, any foreign language is always more difficult than your own. The point is that people don’t check what they do, or they assume it’s fine. That’s the part I don’t get.

  7. Larry says:

    Oh, I know. My point is that people who are sloppy in their own language tend to be careless in others.

  8. Martijn says:

    I prefer ‘dienstwagen to ‘servicewagen’. But then again, Servicewagen on a German VW makes perfectly good sense. 🙂

  9. Milo says:

    It’s all my fault, Caroline 🙂

  10. Caroline says:

    Milo! Don’t tell me you designed that ‘servicewagen’!

  11. Milo says:

    No, but I was the one who first forwarded your Flickr photo to Martijn.

  12. Caroline says:

    Heh, just kidding.

  13. mare says:

    Using apostrophes in the wrong places is done wrong by many native speakers/writers as well. I wouldn’t call it specifically Dunglish. Only because the rules in Dutch are different, Dutch writers tend to make this mistake more often.

  14. mare says:

    It’s quite scary to comment here, BTW, just because I’m too afraid to make a Dunglish-ism. Nataska must me really assimilated now, anal retentivism about language is a typical Dutch thing. In her home country Québec/Canada (where I happen to live now, we sort of switched countries/cities) people are much more forgiving of errors in language. It’s about communication here, and everybody makes errors. So what?

    My father, who was a university professor in Dutch, was very forgiving in spelling and syntax mistakes. “If people are using it, it is part of the language,” he used to say.

  15. Natashka says:

    Mare, your English is fine. If people use English *instead* of Dutch altogether, then they should use English grammar, as they will be read by speakers of many languages. You can’t have it both ways. Of course, it’s not easy. When people in Québec start advertising in bad Spanish *instead* of French to sound hip, send me an e-mail 🙂

  16. Natashka says:

    If the Dutch feel the need to use English to communicate with each other, then something has to be wrong. If they want to communicate with the rest of the world, OK, but that’s often not the case.

  17. Wild Man Tony says:

    In the words of the great Frank Zappa…”the crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe (‘)”
    Even the Dutch don’t know the correct way to use one….what hope does the rest of the world have?

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