Dutch Study Group

[Le Baron]

de verzameling van boeken
het verzamelen van boeken

There are tons of Dutch verbs/nouns with "ing" or "en".

I think I see a pattern. "ing" seems to indicate "the thing" whereas "en" seems to indicate "the process of". In other words, "ing" seems to be "noun-ish" and "en" tends to be "verb-ish".

Yes I'd go along with that. And there is indeed a sense of vagueness, because 'de verzameling van..' could easily sit in a sentence offering the same sort of meaning. At first glance if I saw:

de verzameling van boeken I would take that as 'the book collection'. Een verzameling, so a noun.

Whereas with het verzamelen van boeken I'd immediately take it as 'the collecting of books.' The process. Completely in line with what you said.

The 'changing of the seasons..' one you mentioned above fits into this as well: thing (changing) and the verb process. That structure using 'het + infinitive verb'

A similar pattern exists in English:

The renovation of houses is a skill.
Renovating houses is a skill.

[Le Baron]

Not only a good listening exercise (and subtitles are reasonable, just a few wrong words), but also an insight into the persistent problem of bank surveillance here. They also use AI technology for this and not just for the checks, but also for systems where you complain or give feedback. So that bank accounts are unjustly blocked with little recourse apart from expensive legal action. As the woman near the end says cash use is deliberately discouraged or made difficult, so if you use or move cash they think you're a money launderer! But the fellow at the beginning says they lots of people move money from ING because they pay no interest and in fact charge you.

The extent of automated systems here in NL is far out of control.

[lichtrausch]

I came across the following in the introduction to the The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories. I didn't know Dutch had changed so drastically in recent centuries.

[...]Readers in France, Germany, Russia, England and the United States can still easily read 'their' authors from the not-so-distant past. Present-day French readers can appreciate Victor Hugo's Les Misérables without a dictionary, and for a child in Manchester required to read Macbeth, Shakespeare's writing is not nearly as impenetrable as a book written in Hebrew or Hindi.
In contrast, the Dutch language is constantly in the throes of change so radical and sweeping that Dutch linguistics and literature departments at universities in the Netherlands offer courses in 'diachronic linguistics', in which these changes are the topic of investigation. Many great works of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch literature have to be translated into modern Dutch to make them accessible to the average reader, to whom eighteenth-century Dutch - and I do not exaggerate - seems almost like a foreign tongue, as exotic and indecipherable as Hindi.
Consequently, even cultured Dutch readers generally pay mere lip service to their country's literary canon. In secondary school, we are introduced - however briefly - to the leading literary lights of our Golden Age, Joost van den Vondel and P.C. Hooft, but only a small number of academics are still equipped to read Vondel's play Lucifer in its original form. By now, it has been through at least four rounds of translation and modernization.
Even nineteenth-century Dutch authors are now drifting away into the abstract, inaccessible backwaters of the canon, at the same time that Dutch readers have a wide choice of recently translated nineteenth-century stories and novels by great writers in major world languages, such as de Maupassant, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert and Henry James. A new Dutch translation of Joyce's Ulysses, published in 2014, received more publicity and attracted more readers than a new edition of a Dutch masterpiece, Multatuli's Max Havelaar (1860), about an eccentric loner's battle against the corrupt colonial regime in the Dutch East Indies.
The growing impenetrability of our own canon, combined with a long-established interest in classic literature in major world languages, has unmistakably influenced our image of our own literary culture. In fact, many Dutch readers have almost completely lost touch with our own classics.[...]

[Le Baron]

I came across the following in the introduction to the The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories. I didn't know Dutch had changed so drastically in recent centuries.

It might also depend on the tenacity and patience/curiosity of the reader. Indeed my copy of Bontekoe's famous journal (17thC) is 'hertaald' by Thomas Rosenboom into modern Dutch. It no doubt makes it easier, but I've also seen a copy of the original with explanatory notes and it's not completely impenetrable. Multatuli's Max Havelaar was something I read early on. It took a while, but it is completely readable.

If you look on people's bookshelves here they do indeed have a copy of the 'complete works of Shakespeare' (which no-ones reads anywhere, but it looks good), rather than the home-grown Vondel. And you find Oscar Wilde a bit more than his Dutch contemporary in many ways Louis Couperus.

The appetite here for foreign (mostly English) classic and modern literature, as much in translation, has also sidelined Dutch a bit. Copies of books like the Ulysses mentioned turn up in the 2nd hand bookshops and the spine tells you the reader only went a short way into the book before giving up exhausted. People have told me: 'Have you read James Joyce? I tried it and it's impossible!' And then I wonder, is it more a struggle to wade through English even natives would find to be a bit of a chore, than to spend time with older Dutch?

I'm no scholar of the changes in the Dutch language, but I suspect some of it is exaggerated. You can read older English literature, and I mean Brontë sisters, Anthony Trollope, and be tripped up to a greater or lesser degree by style and vocabulary. This doesn't seem to deter people. The spelling reforms in Dutch have caused unfamiliarity, but there is no greater loss of vocabulary compared to currently-employed vocabulary than in any other language.

[tungemål]

There is an excerpt of a work by Joost van den Vondel on his wikipedia page. I had to use the English translation as a crutch, but I'm not Dutch.

The language is not very different from modern Dutch - mostly slight changes in spelling, so yes I'd say it's an exaggeration. There's only one word I don't recognize - "eersleip".
Edit: and "onverwelckbren".

Reading old classics is still not easy of course, no matter what language.

[Le Baron]

I'd want to know what their proposed cut-off point is. I read the two 'Zwerver' novels by Arthur van Schendel, Een Zwerver Verliefd and Een Zwerver Verdwaald. 1904 and 1907 respecively, though my editions are 1917. So 20th century still with the older spelling. e.g. oogen rather than ogen etc.

This was before Google Translate and other easy things to consult and I found lots of unfamiliar words, but upon asking people and consulting the university library's dictionaries I found they were either just typical literary vocabulary or words which aren't the common everyday choice. So people I asked would say 'yes, I know the word, but I don't use it...' Such as altoos = altijd, voorwaar = indeed/verily. Then others fallen out of everyday usage such as somtijds, but which should cause no real trouble if you already know English.

The everyday reader in their native language, whatever it is, will have a similar obstacle. To a greater or lesser extent. In line with what tungemål said above I am also not Dutch, so what I miss is the 'feel', that language intuition you have when you can make very educated guesses because the language is such a part of your thought apparatus. Nevertheless, as an L2 speaker I do okay with a bit of effort and willing curiosity.

[Le Baron]

From an article on the front page of Sud Radio (which I'm listening to as I redraw pattern alterations!):

"Ils doivent leur parler de sujets qui les touchent et la difficulté de la langue les rebute plus qu'avant"...

In relation to the study of classic texts for 'le programme du bac'. Which is not very different from anywhere now. Maybe others can speak about other languages, but I know that both French and English schoolchildren complain about 'classic literature' and that the general reading publics also feel more divorced from it. Consider though that in France these 'classic texts' are pushed fairly heavily and there is still a sense of separation from modern language. Classic texts here in NL aren't pushed that much at all, so it will feel worse. I just asked my wife what she read for Dutch and she named 'Nathan Sid' (1983, Adriaan van Dis) and Couperus's De Stille Kracht (1900), which is an established classic. Some of the others were books that came out in the 70s like En dan is er koffie (1976, Hannes Meinkema) which is a second-wave feminist novel. So not much 'classic'.

https://www.sudradio.fr/societe/bac-de- ... classiques

[Le Baron]

Good listening practise, a good message about 'greenwashing', with good subtitles. From NOS op 3. There's a funny/not-so-funny bit with the statement about 'product certification seals'. 12 minutes 21 all-in.

[lichtrausch]

[Le Baron]

Best bit for me was hearing the Sranatongo and the woman speaking Xhosa. I hate to be negative, but I wanted him to ask the people who said 'I speak French' to do it. German too. So many people say it, but rarely deliver the goods. What the French girl said about defaulting to English was more accurate. You'd have to ask why, if so many can speak French, they don't default to French if someone has an obvious French accent?

I suppose we should treat 'I speak' more like what the fellow at the end said: that it's not all fluency and you have to think about it to get back into a groove. Also that some are just very basic.