A language learners’ forum

grayson wrote:I took great relish in saying to the younger among them, "I've been speaking the language longer than you have."

Yes I love that one. Even though the little blighters still have a better accent etc.

Le Baron wrote:Do you consider it perhaps higher or lower? It sounds/looks like regular Dutch to me of the sort they put on the government websites to reach all general levels of comprehension. You might want to compare it with the official pages on this from the Rijksoverheid website: De donorwet. Which is even shorter!

Did you notice when he was reading the paragraph donorregister he said 'gemeente' instead of 'website'? Also he says transplantatie like 'transplantasie'. So he's a southerner.

I just always like to gauge the opinions of those more experienced than I. I have a pretty bad issue with imposter syndrome and usually assume that if I'm able to do something it's because the difficulty of that thing has been overstated as opposed to my own skills being good enough (this applies in quite a lot of things I do in life though...)

On the plus side, if I ever need a kidney in a Dutch hospital I should be OK to understand whats going on.

Can anyone explain this expression:

goed bij varen

or

wel bij varen

[Holland] verwachtte dat de handel er wel bij zou varen.
Een voorstel waar iedereen wel bij zou varen.

tungemål wrote:Can anyone explain this expression:

goed bij varen

or

wel bij varen

[Holland] verwachtte dat de handel er wel bij zou varen.
Een voorstel waar iedereen wel bij zou varen.

Personally, I can't. However, one of my dictionaries can shed some light on it.

From Van dale groot woordenboek (iOS app):

(België) ergens goed bij varen
= to profit from something

(België) ergens goed/slecht varen
= to be well/poorly received/treated somewhere

---------------------------------------------

varen = get on, fare

eg
ergens wel bij varen
= to do well by/out of something, be the better for something

laat me maar eens horen hoe je gevaren bent
= tell me how you got on

Negerhollands.
I'm always startled when I look up a Dutch word in Wiktionary, and I see an entry for Negerhollands. This was a Dutch based creole, apparently extinct. The name is less than politically correct nowadays, to put it mildly. It was used in the Danish West Indies (now US Virgin Islands). Yes, even the Danish had colonies. If you check out the Wikipedia page, there are text samples.

tungemål wrote:Negerhollands.
I'm always startled when I look up a Dutch word in Wiktionary, and I see an entry for Negerhollands. This was a Dutch based creole, apparently extinct. The name is less than politically correct nowadays, to put it mildly. It was used in the Danish West Indies (now US Virgin Islands). Yes, even the Danish had colonies. If you check out the Wikipedia page, there are text samples.

I'll tell you one which is still used even by some Surinamers: negerengels. A fellow from Suriname used this word when he was talking to me and my wife (also Surinamese) about Sranantongo; pointing out that it contains mostly English and is an English creole.

It seems to me that for a long time the word 'neger' (just like nègre or Spanish negro) was just considered legit, and still is thought to be by some. The fact that Dutch has another word - nikker - which really is a cognate of the horrid English word, demonstrates this for me. That one really is deprecated, but still it's a separate word. It's only lately that 'neger' has been deprecated. Those chocolate-covered marshmallow on a biscuit things were, until recently, called 'negerzoenen', but since about the early 2000s changed to 'zoentjes'.

Your wife is from Surinam?
That was going to be my next question. I'm wondering how the Dutch in Surinam is. Do they have a particular dialect, or is it standard Amsterdam Dutch?

Interesting how Dutch as a colonial language can be used in different parts of the world. South Africa (Afrikans is basically Dutch), and Indonesian has many Dutch words.

tungemål wrote:Your wife is from Surinam?

Born there, but she left aged 18 months.

tungemål wrote:I'm wondering how the Dutch in Surinam is. Do they have a particular dialect, or is it standard Amsterdam Dutch?.

My opinion on this isn't at all autoritative, I could be wrong, but to me it's mostly accent. I know what Wikipedia says on this, but I had a somewhat different experience the times I've visited there. Though of course people use different vocabulary - including some older words from Dutch, similar to Afrikaans - and words from Sranan, Malay/Indonesian languages and Hindi...and English. Also that among Surinamers a conversation can go any way depending on the person, their age, and context. Dutch is 'official' but at home it likely won't be the main language at all for some. I found it odd to be in a shop with everything marked-up in Dutch and quite a lot of people not speaking Dutch at all!

My wife was adopted by her aunt and uncle (who couldn't have children) and brought to NL. The aunt, like her real father, is of Indonesian extraction whereas the uncle is of Indian origin. Their respective first languages are Javanese and the Caribbean Hindi you find around there; their mutual language at home is Sranantongo. He speaks Dutch perfectly, which he learned at school, but her 'mother' speaks it with much less facility. My wife was brought up to speak Dutch as the main language in order, her father says, to give her the best chance and not be treated like a 'foreigner', It has worked...mostly. Inevitably she heard her parents and other relatives speaking Sranan so she picked that up and her grandmother spoke only Javanese, so that too.

tungemål wrote:Your wife is from Surinam?
Interesting how Dutch as a colonial language can be used in different parts of the world. South Africa (Afrikans is basically Dutch), and Indonesian has many Dutch words.

A friend of mine described studying Afrikaans as being akin to an expansion pack for a video game if ones primary language of interest is Dutch, which I considered an interesting way of looking at it (then made a similar suggestion myself for the Scandinavian languages to each other.)

Here's an interesting video, of a woman speaking Fransch vlaemsch or flamand français if you like. It does sound pretty much like the Flemish in areas in Belgium that border that region around Dunkirk and around, but it's not exactly the same. It's peppered with gallicismes. They use 'klappen' as standard for 'spreken/praten', though this exists in Belgium as well. As in 'nen Hollander kan geen vlaems klappen!' It's also still in the standard Dutch dictionary

'Nen' is a leftover of old dative/accusative 'enen. Cognate with German 'einen'. The initial 'e' dropped as 'nen. This woman is basically explaining how people in her family and all the old neighbours spoke flemish and how a (French speaking) surgeon at the hospital once said she had a marked accent. And that it's thought shameful, though she uses the French 'honte' and here it might mean more that it's 'ridiculed'.

As a Dutch variant it'll probably be gone in a few decades. The French authorities are probably not too bothered about that.