The new ugliest word in Dutch: “gelikete”
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.
