Dutch German Vs. Dutch... How Do They Compare?

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Friendship Tuesday 20th of December 2005 03:43:11 AM
German vs. Dutch... - Hello to all the smart language folks on this board:D
I studied German, intently, as a teenager, and I became semi-fluent in it. I stopped studying it when I was 18 years old, about 26 years ago...Still, whenever I watch the history channel on T.V. and they interview the many Germans who lived through World War II, I can understand, clearly, almost 100% of what they are saying:)... I can also understand most of the things that Adolf Hitler says in his barbaric speaches... I have read that the Dutch language is closer to the German language, than it is to English:). Why is it then, when I listen to Dutch radio on the Internet(even strictly news stations...), or watch Dutch "foreign" films that are subtitled in English, I can hardly understand a single word the Dutch speakers are saying? As I mentioned, I really thought that the two languages were like "fraternal" twins-different, but very similar in many ways. For instance, when I first began studying Dutch, I found that many Dutch words were almost identical to the German word...That was only at the beginning of my Dutch studies. Now, when I am working at understanding the Dutch pronunciation of their language(with its throatal "g", rolling "r's", etc..-which seem a little different from German), I am toatally lost. I can hardly understand a single word)! Since I was only about 13 years old when I began studying German, that language is still entrenched in my mind, and it seems so much easier to understand German colloquial words when they are spoken to me, than Dutch words...Why is that?

Mathieu Tuesday 20th of December 2005 04:45:19 AM
- That is very logical, don't worry! :D I myself don't understand much of German when I listen to it, and my friends and family are no better (sure there are Dutch people that speak German well but they live at the border, usual Dutch people from the street do not know German, in spite of what I always hear foreigners say..). When a Dutchman and a German talk, it will be in English. At least at meetings I've experienced. I have had German in school for 4 years or so, but I'm completely useless at it, and I don't take that personally because so are my friends and classmates :D
People around here on PB often seem to think German and Dutch are for some reason greatly related. They are related, they are West Germanic languages to be precise, but so is English. So, it is not that much more natural for a German speaker to understand Dutch than it is for an English speaker. Of course German helps with Dutch though - they are neighbours, they've influenced each other and they have inhereted some things that got lost in English because of Roman influence. That causes English to be less like the other two, so if you had to choose, German would be more helpful than English. But Dutch and German are not really that close as for example the Scandinavian languages are. To give some indication I always use, when Dutch and German split up from an ancestral language, Old Norse would still be spoken in Scandiavia for centuries before it divided into the languages we know today.
I think German can be great help when learning to understand written Dutch, a little more so than English, but that's pretty much where it ends. All languagages have different ways of phrasing things so as for your own production it shouldn't be that facilitating and also as for the actual speech, German isn't much more similar to Dutch than English is. For example, the German and Dutch "r"s are interchangable, but the the "l" in German is pronounced differently at syllable endings than it is in Dutch and English (in other words, sometimes Dutch and German are alike, sometimes English and Dutch - I could give tons of examples for both cases). I think a combination of speech from pretty much all other Germanic languages will give you Dutch, you can't do it from German or English alone.. :)
Now if you were fluent in Swedish and couldn't understand any Norwegian, that's when you should go doubt yourself :p As for your current situation, nothing surprising :) If you want languages that are real close, try a West Frisian dialect or Afrikaans :D

Osman Wednesday 21st of December 2005 06:49:42 PM
-
hey Mathieu that was a helpful explanation ;)

i am one of the people who think Dutch is quite similar too German more than English, or German is similar to Dutch :)

that was one of the my reason while i am deciding to learn some dutch although i havent started yet because of my exams:p

tot ziens! :D

Mathieu Wednesday 21st of December 2005 07:42:51 PM
- I think especially for the basics it's great, and at least one of the 4 skills, namely reading, will be alot easier with it. Like I said Dutch and German aren't that closely related, but they've apparently influenced each other or have been influenced by the same languages or something, anyway, it's surprising I can hardly read a single word of Old Dutch, though modern German is pretty doable, if the words are short and easy. (as for the long words, it's very easy to transcribe the German ones into Dutch ones, or the other way around, but then they won't make sense anymore - you'll end up with a word made up of small words that all exist seperately, but together don't mean anything in the other language :))

Nostromo Tuesday 27th of December 2005 07:55:48 PM
- I have to contradict you Teup, German and Dutch are closely related, but Dutch has been tinkered with over the years making it seem different. English is a west germanic language, but it's vocabulary is almost 60% Latin through French (Norman conquest) and it is only the grammar and basiswoordenschat which are Germanic. I can see that Dutch and german are greatly related and it isn't a giant leap of the imagination to see the relations between words, grammar and forms. How many poeple in the Netherlands have trouble with Vlaams? Yet it would be absurd to say they are not related...:D

Mathieu Tuesday 27th of December 2005 10:45:07 PM
- I think pretty much every modern language in the world's vocabulary is over 60% Latin, depending on where you draw the line :) - there is no "total" vocabulary, if you keep on digging in obscure academic corners of a languge you'll always end up with alot of Latin - but the number of words doesn't tell you how X a language is, it's usage does. And English is well over 90% Germanic when looking at frequencies of words, just like the other Germanic languages.
It's true there are alot or relations between Dutch and German, and I'm not saying there are more between Dutch and English than there are between Dutch and German. Yes, Dutch and German are closer to each other than Dutch and English. But it's not all that close still, that's what I'm trying to point out. Afrikaans, Standard Flemish Dutch and the Frisian spoken in the Netherlands are all way closer.
I don't have any trouble reading Flemish news etc. (in fact, I could hardly tell it's Flemish at all.. leaving dialects out of consideration, they're horrible :D - goes for all languages discussed here :)), I have a little more trouble with Afrikaans, a little more with Frisian, and still some more with German. German is beyond the point I could still understand anything of if it wasn't for my years long education (well, I don't mean to say that I don't suck at it anyway :p).

The main trouble is, you can transcribe between Dutch and German pretty easily, I can hear all words when I'm listening to it, I could write most of it down, I could transcribe it into Dutch counterparts, but those are empty, meaningless words.
For example; let's pick a short and easy one. The German word for the Dutch "afspraak" (appointment, agreement) is, according to my dictionary, "Verabredung". I could transcribe that into a Dutch "verafreding" or something alike. But does that make any sense? Not at all.. A different one for it seems to be "Abmachung" which would transcribe as "afmaking" which is also meaningless. Yes, eventually there is "Absprache" which is "afspraak", which [b]does[/b] mean "appointment". But here we're just lucky (it's also a fairly simple word) in many cases there is no corresponding synonym, and I just hear "German words" when listening to German, which I could analyze and all, but which have no meaning to me. (In fact, in this case Swedish would be more intelligable (with the difference of course that the words themselves are more different) - "avtal" translates literally to "afspraak").

All in all, I think German is pretty remote from Dutch when it comes to building up words and ways of phrasing things (which I haven't demonstrated), and rather similar when it comes to actual transcribing (the tool kit to build it with is similar: words look alike and syntax does too, often); while Swedish in my experience has more similar ways of expressing things (both compounds and phrasing-wise) but is of course not alike word-wise, which requires plain old studying.

And besides, we have to be careful when saying "related" - relationship can be a cause to similarity but it need not be it. In this case, it's influence rather than relationship that causes the similary, if only for the fact that I can't read Old Dutch at all. If the similarity was caused by relationship, I should be able to read that at least as good as German, logically.

By the way, here's an example of Dutch, English and German. Just for the ones that for some reason are interested :D
the "l":
German: push tip of the tongue upwards
Dutch: push tip of the tongue upwards when before a vowel (this is called a "light l"), push tongue tip downwards and bring back of the tongue up when after a vowel (a "dark l")
English: same as Dutch

the "w"
German: very consonant like
Dutch: consonant like (though slighly "weaker") when before a vowel, vowel like when behind it
English: always vowel like

the short "i"
German: very tense and wide
Dutch: less tense and wide
English: same as Dutch

There are a bunch of other speech sounds which sort of have Dutch in between English and German, but there are also things, on the other hand, that English and German share that Dutch doesn't have - for example, a tendency to pronounce "er" as "ah" (British English), a "z" and "v" sound (absent in northern standard Dutch), a "g" sound, the diphtongs that are written as "ai" and "oi" in English (yes, Dutch "hoi" being the exception), etc.

Thus, my idea: All three of them have their own little peculiarities (Dutch and German most similar, if needed to group things), each with it's own languages that are similar to it (Afrikaans, Frisian for Dutch; Yiddish, Luxembourgian for German; a bunch of creoles for English, for example :))

Nostromo Wednesday 28th of December 2005 03:54:46 AM
- I have to say you have given a fair comment on what I said, apart from one thing: the amount of Latin influence in Dutch and German is not just a bit lower it is WAY lower. A good 90% of the educated vocubulary of English is Latin/French derived and a simple test would be to look at the words under Q in the English dictionary; compare ththat with the Dutch and it is almost nothing, even the similar sounding Kw- words (kwadraat, kwitant...) are not a broad group.:)
The French influence on Dutch is from the Napoleonic era and it was actually not as influential as folk are liable to think. In England after the Norman conquest the official language was French and English in the older forms was a "common" language. The Impact French had on English was massive, think of 'difficult', 'consideration', etc., all these are French derived words. Dutch not only does not follow this pattern it is plainly Germanic in the places English is not, or no longer is:in basic grammar; ge- prefix, etc.
Not to cause an argument mind...:D

Mathieu Wednesday 28th of December 2005 04:04:40 AM
- Well, I can only agree with that :) In fact, I wonder if it wasn't for French, I wonder how close English would be to Dutch - pretty close I think.. even in syntax. (I recall a phrase "is nu geworden" which is Old English, but identical to modern Dutch, that was a pretty striking example..)

Yes, alot more of the educated vocabulary is Latin/French in English than it is in the other two (I think German has the least, since that used to be the language of science, but that's just a guess), that's the main thing that sets English more apart from the other two I think.
Though I think for all languages there's pretty much an infinite number of Latin words, if you really include everything, but that's of course a bit silly, hence the usage frequency thing :)

Phrasebase Archive
	Friendship	Tuesday 20th of December 2005 03:43:11 AM
	German vs. Dutch... - Hello to all the smart language folks on this board:D I studied German, intently, as a teenager, and I became semi-fluent in it. I stopped studying it when I was 18 years old, about 26 years ago...Still, whenever I watch the history channel on T.V. and they interview the many Germans who lived through World War II, I can understand, clearly, almost 100% of what they are saying:)... I can also understand most of the things that Adolf Hitler says in his barbaric speaches... I have read that the Dutch language is closer to the German language, than it is to English:). Why is it then, when I listen to Dutch radio on the Internet(even strictly news stations...), or watch Dutch "foreign" films that are subtitled in English, I can hardly understand a single word the Dutch speakers are saying? As I mentioned, I really thought that the two languages were like "fraternal" twins-different, but very similar in many ways. For instance, when I first began studying Dutch, I found that many Dutch words were almost identical to the German word...That was only at the beginning of my Dutch studies. Now, when I am working at understanding the Dutch pronunciation of their language(with its throatal "g", rolling "r's", etc..-which seem a little different from German), I am toatally lost. I can hardly understand a single word)! Since I was only about 13 years old when I began studying German, that language is still entrenched in my mind, and it seems so much easier to understand German colloquial words when they are spoken to me, than Dutch words...Why is that?
	Mathieu	Tuesday 20th of December 2005 04:45:19 AM
	- That is very logical, don't worry! :D I myself don't understand much of German when I listen to it, and my friends and family are no better (sure there are Dutch people that speak German well but they live at the border, usual Dutch people from the street do not know German, in spite of what I always hear foreigners say..). When a Dutchman and a German talk, it will be in English. At least at meetings I've experienced. I have had German in school for 4 years or so, but I'm completely useless at it, and I don't take that personally because so are my friends and classmates :D People around here on PB often seem to think German and Dutch are for some reason greatly related. They are related, they are West Germanic languages to be precise, but so is English. So, it is not that much more natural for a German speaker to understand Dutch than it is for an English speaker. Of course German helps with Dutch though - they are neighbours, they've influenced each other and they have inhereted some things that got lost in English because of Roman influence. That causes English to be less like the other two, so if you had to choose, German would be more helpful than English. But Dutch and German are not really that close as for example the Scandinavian languages are. To give some indication I always use, when Dutch and German split up from an ancestral language, Old Norse would still be spoken in Scandiavia for centuries before it divided into the languages we know today. I think German can be great help when learning to understand written Dutch, a little more so than English, but that's pretty much where it ends. All languagages have different ways of phrasing things so as for your own production it shouldn't be that facilitating and also as for the actual speech, German isn't much more similar to Dutch than English is. For example, the German and Dutch "r"s are interchangable, but the the "l" in German is pronounced differently at syllable endings than it is in Dutch and English (in other words, sometimes Dutch and German are alike, sometimes English and Dutch - I could give tons of examples for both cases). I think a combination of speech from pretty much all other Germanic languages will give you Dutch, you can't do it from German or English alone.. :) Now if you were fluent in Swedish and couldn't understand any Norwegian, that's when you should go doubt yourself :p As for your current situation, nothing surprising :) If you want languages that are real close, try a West Frisian dialect or Afrikaans :D
	Osman	Wednesday 21st of December 2005 06:49:42 PM
	- hey Mathieu that was a helpful explanation ;) i am one of the people who think Dutch is quite similar too German more than English, or German is similar to Dutch :) that was one of the my reason while i am deciding to learn some dutch although i havent started yet because of my exams:p tot ziens! :D
	Mathieu	Wednesday 21st of December 2005 07:42:51 PM
	- I think especially for the basics it's great, and at least one of the 4 skills, namely reading, will be alot easier with it. Like I said Dutch and German aren't that closely related, but they've apparently influenced each other or have been influenced by the same languages or something, anyway, it's surprising I can hardly read a single word of Old Dutch, though modern German is pretty doable, if the words are short and easy. (as for the long words, it's very easy to transcribe the German ones into Dutch ones, or the other way around, but then they won't make sense anymore - you'll end up with a word made up of small words that all exist seperately, but together don't mean anything in the other language :))
	Nostromo	Tuesday 27th of December 2005 07:55:48 PM
	- I have to contradict you Teup, German and Dutch are closely related, but Dutch has been tinkered with over the years making it seem different. English is a west germanic language, but it's vocabulary is almost 60% Latin through French (Norman conquest) and it is only the grammar and basiswoordenschat which are Germanic. I can see that Dutch and german are greatly related and it isn't a giant leap of the imagination to see the relations between words, grammar and forms. How many poeple in the Netherlands have trouble with Vlaams? Yet it would be absurd to say they are not related...:D
	Mathieu	Tuesday 27th of December 2005 10:45:07 PM
	- I think pretty much every modern language in the world's vocabulary is over 60% Latin, depending on where you draw the line :) - there is no "total" vocabulary, if you keep on digging in obscure academic corners of a languge you'll always end up with alot of Latin - but the number of words doesn't tell you how X a language is, it's usage does. And English is well over 90% Germanic when looking at frequencies of words, just like the other Germanic languages. It's true there are alot or relations between Dutch and German, and I'm not saying there are more between Dutch and English than there are between Dutch and German. Yes, Dutch and German are closer to each other than Dutch and English. But it's not all that close still, that's what I'm trying to point out. Afrikaans, Standard Flemish Dutch and the Frisian spoken in the Netherlands are all way closer. I don't have any trouble reading Flemish news etc. (in fact, I could hardly tell it's Flemish at all.. leaving dialects out of consideration, they're horrible :D - goes for all languages discussed here :)), I have a little more trouble with Afrikaans, a little more with Frisian, and still some more with German. German is beyond the point I could still understand anything of if it wasn't for my years long education (well, I don't mean to say that I don't suck at it anyway :p). The main trouble is, you can transcribe between Dutch and German pretty easily, I can hear all words when I'm listening to it, I could write most of it down, I could transcribe it into Dutch counterparts, but those are empty, meaningless words. For example; let's pick a short and easy one. The German word for the Dutch "afspraak" (appointment, agreement) is, according to my dictionary, "Verabredung". I could transcribe that into a Dutch "verafreding" or something alike. But does that make any sense? Not at all.. A different one for it seems to be "Abmachung" which would transcribe as "afmaking" which is also meaningless. Yes, eventually there is "Absprache" which is "afspraak", which [b]does[/b] mean "appointment". But here we're just lucky (it's also a fairly simple word) in many cases there is no corresponding synonym, and I just hear "German words" when listening to German, which I could analyze and all, but which have no meaning to me. (In fact, in this case Swedish would be more intelligable (with the difference of course that the words themselves are more different) - "avtal" translates literally to "afspraak"). All in all, I think German is pretty remote from Dutch when it comes to building up words and ways of phrasing things (which I haven't demonstrated), and rather similar when it comes to actual transcribing (the tool kit to build it with is similar: words look alike and syntax does too, often); while Swedish in my experience has more similar ways of expressing things (both compounds and phrasing-wise) but is of course not alike word-wise, which requires plain old studying. And besides, we have to be careful when saying "related" - relationship can be a cause to similarity but it need not be it. In this case, it's influence rather than relationship that causes the similary, if only for the fact that I can't read Old Dutch at all. If the similarity was caused by relationship, I should be able to read that at least as good as German, logically. By the way, here's an example of Dutch, English and German. Just for the ones that for some reason are interested :D the "l": German: push tip of the tongue upwards Dutch: push tip of the tongue upwards when before a vowel (this is called a "light l"), push tongue tip downwards and bring back of the tongue up when after a vowel (a "dark l") English: same as Dutch the "w" German: very consonant like Dutch: consonant like (though slighly "weaker") when before a vowel, vowel like when behind it English: always vowel like the short "i" German: very tense and wide Dutch: less tense and wide English: same as Dutch There are a bunch of other speech sounds which sort of have Dutch in between English and German, but there are also things, on the other hand, that English and German share that Dutch doesn't have - for example, a tendency to pronounce "er" as "ah" (British English), a "z" and "v" sound (absent in northern standard Dutch), a "g" sound, the diphtongs that are written as "ai" and "oi" in English (yes, Dutch "hoi" being the exception), etc. Thus, my idea: All three of them have their own little peculiarities (Dutch and German most similar, if needed to group things), each with it's own languages that are similar to it (Afrikaans, Frisian for Dutch; Yiddish, Luxembourgian for German; a bunch of creoles for English, for example :))
	Nostromo	Wednesday 28th of December 2005 03:54:46 AM
	- I have to say you have given a fair comment on what I said, apart from one thing: the amount of Latin influence in Dutch and German is not just a bit lower it is WAY lower. A good 90% of the educated vocubulary of English is Latin/French derived and a simple test would be to look at the words under Q in the English dictionary; compare ththat with the Dutch and it is almost nothing, even the similar sounding Kw- words (kwadraat, kwitant...) are not a broad group.:) The French influence on Dutch is from the Napoleonic era and it was actually not as influential as folk are liable to think. In England after the Norman conquest the official language was French and English in the older forms was a "common" language. The Impact French had on English was massive, think of 'difficult', 'consideration', etc., all these are French derived words. Dutch not only does not follow this pattern it is plainly Germanic in the places English is not, or no longer is:in basic grammar; ge- prefix, etc. Not to cause an argument mind...:D
	Mathieu	Wednesday 28th of December 2005 04:04:40 AM
	- Well, I can only agree with that :) In fact, I wonder if it wasn't for French, I wonder how close English would be to Dutch - pretty close I think.. even in syntax. (I recall a phrase "is nu geworden" which is Old English, but identical to modern Dutch, that was a pretty striking example..) Yes, alot more of the educated vocabulary is Latin/French in English than it is in the other two (I think German has the least, since that used to be the language of science, but that's just a guess), that's the main thing that sets English more apart from the other two I think. Though I think for all languages there's pretty much an infinite number of Latin words, if you really include everything, but that's of course a bit silly, hence the usage frequency thing :)