Dutch Study Group

An area with study groups for various languages. Group members help each other, share resources and experience. Study groups are permanent but the members rotate and change.
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Sonjaconjota
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Re: Dutch Study Group

Postby Sonjaconjota » Sun Nov 21, 2021 4:18 pm

I have found this spotify list with songs in Dutch. It's not really my style of music, mostly ... hip-hop, I guess? But maybe it's of use to some people:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3xSrInPaeVl1ajQReyTboM?si=TaXKkjHOTWy3XSCxeM-msQ&nd=1
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Le Baron
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Re: Dutch Study Group

Postby Le Baron » Wed Dec 29, 2021 5:46 pm

In the Dutch discussion room I put these few paragraphs about something that happened yesterday. I thought it would be interesting to pull out a few interesting words.

Slenteren = saunter; roll up.
Sometimes sleuren is used as a synonym for this, or slepen (drag; cognate with German schleppen, but a false-friend perhaps). I learned the word slenteren from the title of an old Simon Carmiggelt book. These bundled 'cursiefjes' or short columns written for newspapers and magazines, were the basis for most, if not all, of his books and he wrote looooads of them that were put out over 50-60 years. On bookstalls here there are piles of the most popular ones for 50c. They're a goldmine of everyday words and 'spreektaal'. Some of the words he uses have already faded away.

Hondenweer = Rotten weather (raining cats and dogs). Another amusing one is 'het regent pijpenstelen' = that it's raining really hard

Ongelegenheid = Inconvenience. I recall first hearing someone say to me on the telephone: "komt het (je) gelegen?" And I was flummoxed and just said yes. It was a telemarketer and I'd just agreed that the call was convenient, so when I then said I didn't want the call, she must have been confused. :lol: Early on in Dutch I couldn't find the right expression for 'convenient' because a lot of people just say handig/niet handig. Nou...dat is niet echt handig voor mij... and I felt like it wasn't really getting close enough to the idea of inconvenience and some people said 'ongemakkelijk', which also means inconvenient, but more in the sense of 'awkward'. Very slippery.

Another common phrase for it is: het is niet van pas, and pas/passend might be best rendered as: 'appropriate'. So a rude joke in polite society is 'niet echt van pas' or 'helemaal ongepast' = inappropriate or not fitting. Though passen also refers to 'fitting' in the actual sense of clothing, which is why you have 'paskamers' for trying on clothes and someone who sees the trousers you're fitting might say: 'het past heel goed bij je!'. You could also say: 'dat past niet bij zo'n kleur' = that doesn't match with the (such a) colour.

The endless spiral of vocabulary!
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tungemål
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Re: Dutch Study Group

Postby tungemål » Sat Jan 22, 2022 12:47 pm

Pronunciation of V, W and F

https://www.learndutch.org/dutch-alphabet-letter-v-w-f/

This has always bugged me, because the Dutch maintain that they pronounce V not as an F but as a voiced F. But a voiced F is how the W is pronounced.

I can hear the difference, and now I think I got it. The V is kind of a F and a W at the same time. Blowing while at the same time voicing the sound?
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Dragon27
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Re: Dutch Study Group

Postby Dragon27 » Sat Jan 22, 2022 2:34 pm

Well, in the neutral language there should be no confusion: F is /f/, V is /v/, and W is /ʋ/. /f/ and /v/ are fricatives (voiceless and voiced respectively), and /ʋ/ is an approximant. /v/ may be partially devoiced, or (according to Wiki) even more:
In the Netherlands, /v/ can devoice and merge with /f/. According to Collins & Mees (2003), there are hardly any speakers of Northern SD who consistently contrast /v/ with /f/.

In low-prestige varieties of Netherlandic Dutch (such as the Amsterdam accent) also /z/ can devoice and merge with /s/.

Speakers who devoice /v/ and /z/ may also hypercorrectively voice /f/ and /s/: concert "concert" may thus be [kɔnˈzɛrt] compared to the more usual [kɔnˈsɛrt].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_pho ... Obstruents
Although it's probably not something recommendable for the beginners/learners.
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tungemål
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Re: Dutch Study Group

Postby tungemål » Sat Jan 22, 2022 2:47 pm

The dutch "W" is not pronounced as the english one - it is more like the english v.
So the dutch "V" is between the english f and the english v.
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Dragon27
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Re: Dutch Study Group

Postby Dragon27 » Sat Jan 22, 2022 3:00 pm

tungemål wrote:The dutch "W" is not pronounced as the english one - it is more like the english v.

Well, English W is a voiced labial–velar approximant, while the Dutch one is a voiced labiodental approximant (or bilabial in some dialects).
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Le Baron
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Re: Dutch Study Group

Postby Le Baron » Sat Jan 22, 2022 4:07 pm

It also depends on the word and the vowel following the 'v'. If you listen to someone say e.g. vergeten, the 'v' sounds a bit different than in a word like vos which sounds close to an 'f'.

I don't care for hypercorrect claims about pronunciation in Dutch because a great deal of actual speech really doesn't closely follow the rules. Hardly anyone says a word like 'meer' according to the officially-claimed pronunciation of double 'e', which would be more like 'mehr'. There's only a fractional difference between words such as meer/mier and beer/bier for quite a lot of speakers.

As for 'W' in Belgium it is lke an English 'w' (and that's the case in Surinam and many Surinamers here speaking Dutch). I'd go with tungemål in saying it is closer to 'v' though it is totally devoiced and more like starting a 'v' but just releasing the teeth from the bottom lip. So for a word such as 'water' you take up the position to start a 'v' and then say 'ater'!
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tungemål
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Re: Dutch Study Group

Postby tungemål » Wed Jan 26, 2022 5:04 pm

Use of er in Dutch

The use of er is peculiar. I've only got a feeling for how it's used, but I don't really understand it. Except that it's kind of an unstressed daar. Anyone want to explain it or point to a good grammer explanation?

- Darren was benieuwd wat erop stond
- Daar staat er een op en ginds staat er ook een op
- Het begint niet, voordat ik er ben
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tungemål
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Re: Use of er in Dutch

Postby tungemål » Fri Jan 28, 2022 1:53 pm

After studying a bit on the internet I answer my own question.

This site has a good grammar explanation of er:
UCL: Dutch Linguistics
(tip: don't click on the "read more about er"-link unless you really want to twist your brain)

Basically, there are 4 functions that er can have:

Locative:
* Jan woont er ook.
* Het begint niet, voordat ik er ben

Prepositional:
* Wij sporen er de buurvrouw toe aan.
* Darren was benieuwd wat erop stond

Quantitative:
*Henk bezit er drie.

Grammatical:
* Er wordt gelachen.
* Er kijken veel mannen naar Truus.

Notice that (in my view) only in the first case (locative) does it really mean daar. When it's used with a preposition, er replaces het since you can't say "op het" in Dutch.

In the quantitative case it means something like "of them" (He has three of them).

The grammatical er doesn't have any meaning; it's only a grammar requirement. In Norwegian we'd use "det" in this case, in English "there", or nothing.
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Le Baron
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Re: Use of er in Dutch

Postby Le Baron » Sun Feb 13, 2022 9:49 pm

tungemål wrote:In the quantitative case it means something like "of them" (He has three of them).

Indeed. Like French's Il en a trois. Er + telwoord. Heeft tungemål boeken thuis? Ja, hij heeft er zeker 800 (van).

tungemål wrote:The grammatical er doesn't have any meaning; it's only a grammar requirement. In Norwegian we'd use "det" in this case, in English "there", or nothing.

Aside from the 'er', this sort of phrase really baffled me at the beginning. It's so common to say 'Er wordt gebeld' and the 'wordt' tripped me up because I read it just as 'becoming' when here it essentially just means 'is'. So only until I forced myself to see Er wordt gelachen as 'laughter is occurring', did it make sense to me.

With the sentence: Wij sporen er de buurvrouw toe aan, I would look at these in the past and think 'how?!' The NT2 instructor encouraged us to rewrite such sentences to find the separable verbs and er + preposition, so I'd end up with: wij willen haar ertoe aansporen. Like term grouping in algebra!

One other thing about 'er'. Sometimes, quite a bit actually, you hear people say daar where you'd expect er. So: Je hebt er drie van (ervan). Mag ik er eentje daarvan? (daarvan unseparated). Wat denk je d'rvan?. The common sentence: Hij is er niet often sounds like 'hij is d'r niet'. Somewhat like how French adds a 't' to stop a vowel clash.

Also especially if you want to add stress: Daar hou ik niet van
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