where do english speakers get the idea that dutch is similar to english?

Question

when reading the answers of this question
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AsB4WGiVqUTaXzHDt9ArjTLw7BR.?qid=20070626045527AAb1qFY (yes i know i answered aswell)

i found that most people seem to think dutch and english are alike. i was wondering where this comes from. i myself am dutch, i speak fluent german aswell as english. and i personally feel dutch and english are nothing alike. theyre not even closely related as i found that english much more resembles french

ifact, gving it some more thought, i can only think of one dutch word that was adopted into english. Bulwark. and its not a word used daily.

on top of that, word order and grammer are nothing alike. english has a set word order, and set time expressions for certain conditions. dutch alows much more freedom in where to place words in sentances, and using different time conjugations in dutch might not make a difference.

where do brits get the idea that dutch is similar to english?

i know the three are gaelic in origin, but how does that make dutch more similar to english than german?

besides around 0a.d. the english language was very much 'romanised'

Answer 1

Indeed, Dutch is more different from English than I used to think - as I found out to my cost when I once over-confidently attempted a translation and misunderstood the text with rather amusing results.

I think we English tend to think that Dutch and English are more similar than they really are because we sometimes feel lonely - English has evolved into something of a linguistic isolate and we are perhaps too eager to look for another language that isn't 100% foreign to our ears.

And Dutch does sound comparatively similar to English, when compared with - say - German. Especially the vowel set.

Answer 2

Well, this bit:

(from the answer you wrote to the other question) an example. verb conjucation. past tense, a DE is added to the stem of the verb. unles the verb ends in a K F S CH P or T then TE is added.

is true of English as well. We spell all the endings "ed" or just "d" but we pronounce them according to the same rule.



Dutch and English are closely related (they were the same language about 1500 years ago I believe), but close relation isn't the only thing that make two languages similar. As you say, English vocabulary has a lot in common with French, because French vocabulary was added to the language especially in the first couple centuries after the Norman Conquest (1066). English words that are like Dutch words, on the other hand, are similar because the languages were once one language--and different because they grew apart over the centuries since the languages separated. I'm going to guess these include words like body parts, close relations, basic foods and drinks, etc.--words people needed centuries ago and still do.

Answer 3

The startled pretence that Dutch and English are "nothing alike" is disingenuous - the langauges are clearly closely related, and you should not make the mistake of concluding that because one language has borrowed from the vocabulary of a third language that it is not related to another that has not borrowed so heavily from that third language. The syntax and structure are clearly close and Dutch and English have both developped in similar ways away from the original Germanic prototype format of noun declensions and strong plurals, etc, whilst keeping strong verbs (both have this in common with German).

By the way, neither Dutch nor English nor German have "Gaelic roots", as one answerer has suggested. The Gaelic languages (Scottish, Irish, Manx) are Celtic languages, along with Welsh, Breton and Cornish, and from a different branch of the Indoeuropean family.

Answer 4

I am not a native English speaker, but I do also have this strange idea that Dutch is somewhere in the middle between German and English.

The main issue muddling the water is of course a large influx of Romance words into English. However, if you strip your English vocabulary of the "big words", you are pretty much left with the basic Germanic words. And when I first heard "Hoe laat is het", it immediately reminded me of the non-idiomatic, yet still quite understandable "How late is it", and not at all of "Wie spaet ist es". Also, Dutch has not had the third consonantal change like German did, and this makes many words pretty close to English, if you disregard the vowels, which are thought to be less important to word recognition. But even in vowels, as a previous poster said, German is very clear, without any glides, while English is full of them. Dutch also has glides (ee, ij, ui...), which can make it a bit more familiar to the English ear than German. Also, Dutch do not compulsorily insert a glottal stop before every initial vowel, like in standard German, but flow the words together in a prosody not unlike that of English.

Also, English has lost gender and case distinction, except in pronouns (and genitive). German still keeps gender and (most of the) cases. Dutch is in between, in that it has lost the distinction between masculine and feminine (die & der) but not between animate and inanimate (die + der & das, de & het), and has (like English) lost case marking. Owing to this, German is still thought as a flective language, English is more isolating - as is Dutch.

Another point: English does not have a set word order, nor does Dutch have a fully flexible one. Dutch gets some flexibility by the fact that it still changes the verb by person and number (only seen in English in 3rd person singular), but that is the single instance where I can see a clear difference, off the top of my head. "Een vis heeft een katje gegeten" and "Een katje heeft een vis gegeten" still mean two different things, as they do in English, since neither language has cases any more. Unlike in German, where you could get either meaning with either word order, providing you know how to properly change the nouns.

I do not know about *Brits*, but this is a part of where *I* get the idea that Dutch is similar to English.

Answer 5

Well they are related. I speak both English and German (although not quite fluent in German) and although I can't understand Dutch when spoken, when written I always understand surprisingly many words, phrases and even whole sentences. It's somehow always seems to me as a transitory language between German and English.

Of course Dutch is 10 times closer to German than English - grammar and vocabulary.

Answer 6

I remember Wizard Magazine reported the same, years ago :) Even more, they were surprised how foreign readers writing to them were used to use a far more correct English language than English native speakers from home (the US). I think the reason basically is foreign people tend to learn a sort of "official English" (that's what any school or course is supposed to do); an American person lives inside an English speaking society where the daily language is "bastardized", so they get used to talk that way. Foreign students who study English outside of an English speaking country are somehow "protected" by that. As for your reply to Vangom: the difference between a phonetic and a non-phonetic language is in a phonetic language there always are very specific rules about how to spell letters or group or letters; so it's true in a phonetic language you may face the same letter spelled differently or different letters spelt the same way, but all this IS regulated by rules: for instance in Italian "c" sound is English "ch" when followed by "i" or "e" while have English "k" when followed by a, o, u or h; so there "c" sound have the same spell as "q" sound, but there's no way an Italian speaker can spell "c" the wrong way, since we can follow a rule. Now in English, for instance, can you tell me according to which rule the "oo" sound in "room" and "door" are completely different...?

Answer 7

Dutch-Flemish and English are both, technically speaking, "Germanic" languages(indeed, they're both in the same branch of the Germanic language family). But it is also true that there are a lot of non-Germanic influences in English, especially American English.

Answer 8

A lot of cognates:
moeder, vater, broer, zuster,
open de deur
coffie met melk en zuiker
groen, rood, blauw, wit, goud, bruin,
lippe, haar, schouders, finger, arm, knie, elleboog, voet, tong,
boot, huis, koe, hond, kat, straat, wil, kan, zal, bier, wijn, etc.
Baisc words are similar but you're right about the structure.
English has more influx of latin based words whereas German and Dutch make up interesting combos of their own base voacbualry to make big words. Ex. rijwiel,
My favorite in German is "auspuffrohr" for muffler.
How do the Dutch say that?

Answer 9

they are both germanic languages - English got a lot of vocabulary and some structure from French, but it is still considered a Germanic language, like Dutch.

Answer 10

Well, I don't know the Dutch language, but I do know that there are many Dutch words that sound kinda English. For example, cookie sounds like cookie, good sounds like good, thank you sounds like thank you. Words like these.