Khaki F. Dog

Followup to the previous piece on the new ugliest word in my language, I’d like to expand a bit on this statement:

Dutch is a merchants’ language, harshly deriding ambiguity and far favoring clarity over beauty. This isn’t to say it lacks grace, simply that our verbal eloquence comes from idiom rather than vocabulary.

An example of this just popped on my screen. A car ad with a clip of a dog whos flews are fluttering in the wind with ‘roll over for more’ underneath it. At least, that’s what I assume should be there, since the ad was creepily localized for me: ‘Erover rollen voor meer’.  Let me break this down, since it illustrates the above point precisely.

Er is a particle that’s very difficult to describe in English, because, somewhat contrary to my point here, ‘er’ is hugely ambiguous. Germans and, I presume, Scandinavians will be familiar with its equivalents in their language. The French have a very similar word in y and while I don’t know its equivalent in Spanish, ya is similarly hard to define.

Where ya refers to time (I’m told it can mean ‘already’, ‘still’, ‘now’ or even sometimes ‘later’), er is very much about place. ‘Erover’, then, can be read as ‘over it’ which would make the sentence in the ad: ‘Roll over it for more’. This reads just fine in English, but it’s frustrating to read in Dutch.

It’s too ambiguous, you see. What’s ‘it’, and what are you ‘rolling over’ it?

This isn’t even the right way to construct an imperative sentence. You can often get away with setting an imperative up like this, but only if the subject and object are clear.

‘Click here’, for example, is ‘klik hier’ and that one’s totally fine. I’m being told to ‘click’, which I know how to do, and I’m being told where to do it. No problem. So you could also structure it like the earlier example: ‘hier klikken’. Which one is chosen by a copyeditor will depend on the intende audience: depending on age and cultural background, different Dutch folks will consider one ruder than the other.

In both cases the instruction will be perceived as ruder than it would in English. While in English ‘click here’ is at once an imperative and an implicit invitation, Dutch is profoundly un-weasely and the imperative is always very firm and commanding.

So the copyeditors tried to match the tone of the English phrase ‘roll over for more’ despite the fact that Dutch doesn’t support that particular register, and settled for an ambiguous syntax as well.

Apparently they want us to put the screen on the floor, lean back on it and rock side to side over the ad to learn more.

Fine. Have it your way!

In June I railed against ‘geüpdated’, the neerlandified word for ‘updated’. Now there’s a new contender: ‘gelikete’, meaning ‘liked’ in the context of Facebook’s like button.

The verb ‘to like’ knows no translation in Dutch. No surprise; even among its Germanic siblings the Dutch language has a particular paucity in vocabulary, so it certainly can’t hold a candle to its close cousin English, which suckles at the teats of various Francic, Celtic, Germanic and Latin sources.

Dutch is a merchants’ language, harshly deriding ambiguity and far favoring clarity over beauty. This isn’t to say it lacks grace, simply that our verbal eloquence comes from idiom rather than vocabulary.

Usually this means that a single word in Dutch (especially adjectives and adverbs) covers a whole host of English counterparts. ‘Mooi’ can mean ‘beautiful’, ‘pretty’, ‘handsome’, and even ‘convenient’, ‘good’ or ‘fairly’, depending on the context and the tone of the sentence.

With the English verb ‘like’ the situation is reversed. To tell someone ‘I like you’ you’d say ‘ik vind je leuk’ or ‘ik mag je graag’ or ‘je mag er zijn’ depending on the exact nature of your liking.

This makes the ‘like’ button rather problematic. There’s no substitute for it. Fortunately, pretty much everyone here speaks decent English (and most can hold their own in French or German) so there’s no issue with translating that button as ‘like’. We’re used to absorbing useful words from other languages (a habit for which our Flemish neighbours mock us).

Just as in English, verbs can be used as adjectives. Either the present participle (a rolling stone) or the past participle (a broken vase) will do just fine, but this lands us in murky waters when we use loan words.

‘Liked articles’ become ‘gelikete artikelen’ and since we don’t have a current equivalent to ‘item’ we turn ‘liked items’ into ‘gelikete items’. This is worse than ‘geüpdated’ because that one at least offers some guidance as to how it should be pronounced.

My disapproval is only limited to the written form, mind. There’s no ambiguity or terrible inelegance when the word’s used conversationally; just another bead in the colorful multi-lingual patchwork of daily discourse. But on paper? Yuck.