Verantwoordelijk

I've written before about how easy it is to pick up bits of Dutch vocab in Brussels due to the bilingual nature of public signage. Of course it helps if you speak French fairly well but now and then you can find something resembling English owing to our Norman heritage! Here we can deduce the Dutch word for 'Responsible' (in French Responsable) = 'Verantwoordelijk'. I suppose Old English would have been more like 'Answerable' based on the Dutch...

Aandacht! Politie!

During a pleasant stroll through Brussels with a friend and a slow mooch around some cafés in St. Géry (in Dutch Sint-Gorikseiland) we marvelled at how where we walked there was once marshland and, later, a series of rivers and streams. Among our conversation we touched on the multi-lingual aspect of Brussels' life and my friend posed me a question concerning the pronunciation of '-tie' in Dutch. Ah yes! To English speakers this indicates a hard sounding 'T' and I myself was disconcerted when I realised that this has a soft sound in Dutch and is much more like an 'S'.

For example, police in Dutch is 'politie' but this is not pronounced /po'liti/ (with a hard 'T') but rather /po'litsi/ or softer even /po'lisi/.

Likewise the word 'Attentie' or attention (synonym of aandacht) is pronounced /a'ten'si/ with a soft 'si' ending. This, of course much like the similar word 'attention' in English; we don't pronounce the '-tion' exactly as the spelling of it might indicate. Instead we also employ a softer '-shun' ending.

Food for thought about pronunciation.

Daybreak : dægred : dageraad

Reading through David Crystal's fabulous 'Cambridge Encyclopaedia of The English Language' and I came across a section on Old English vocabulary. I really am fascinated by this link through time to our language's ancestor. It seems so different; how can we even label them both English? Tīdymbwlātend for example means astronomer!

Some words, when explained however, do seem more like close cousins than distant relatives. Sunnandæg or eorþcræft (earthcraft) can be guessed (Sunday and geometry), but others are a bit more mysterious with hints to the modern equivalent. Especially if we compare them with Dutch!

Dægred is a composite word of 'dæg' (day) and 'red' (red) [Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopaedia of The English Language' p.22] and gives a rather poetic interpretation of daybreak or dawn. Checking out the Dutch translation we see a very similar word: 'dageraad'. However this Dutch etymology link claims that 'raad' is not linked to 'red' as in the Old English version ("echter niet samenstelling met rood."). Reference here. This despite red being in Old Frisian, 'rad' and Old Dutch 'root'.

Are these words (dægred and dageraad) not of the same etymology then? Or has somebody got it wrong? Surely not David Crystal!!

Daybreak : English
dægred : Old English
dageraad : Modern Dutch

Day red?

Spelk : Splinter

This post is to put to rest a ghost of mine. When I went to University I thought lots of the words I used daily were standard English (why would I think anything else!?) and was a little surprised when others from around the UK were bemused when I used them.

SPELK is a great word and is only ever used to mean a splinter (of wood), generally in the finger. Upon meeting Scandinavian or Dutch people I would always corner them and ask what 'splinter' was in their language and, until now, I've had no luck and thought spelk was an isolated Northern word, unrelated to other Germanic languages.

Tonight I found the answer here!

It states that spelk comes from Old English (spelc or spilc) for splints (surgical supports). Also related to Old Norse spelkur (splints).

Splint (still in the sense of surgical support) in different languages:

Dutch: spalk
Swedish: spjälor

This page here refers directly to the NE dialect word 'spelk' in the first paragraph:
"oe. spelc ‘spalk’ (ne. dial. spelk)"

The same source states that  spelk, spelc, spalk all derive from the word 'to split' (that is to say "cleave piece of wood):

"Het woord betekent eigenlijk ‘afgespleten stuk hout’ en is een afleiding van de wortel 'splijten'"

Old English used GE- Prefix for past tense

I was watching a history show about England when the presenter held up a beautiful object which he said belonged to King Alfred. The proof was in the inscription which read,

"Alfred mec heht gewyrcan"

This means Alfred had me (ordered me to be) made.

Instantly my curiosity was piqued by the word "gewyrcan' or made. After some research my suspicions that this verb was similar to other Germanic words for to work or to make were confirmed.


English: worked or made
Old English: gewyrcan
Dutch: gewerkt
German: gewerk is used in the term of a craft or a guild.

The next question I asked myself was how far this ge- prefix survived into English, as obviously we don't use it to form the past tense today.

There's a good article about it here : http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/22700/why-doesnt-english-use-the-prefix-ge

…which show that Old English did use a ge- prefix which turned into y-, i- or ȝe- in Middle English and then was lost altogether.

Or was it?

The same article claims that the vestiges of this prefiix exist in the following words: alike, aware, handiwork.

Double check on the online etymology dictionary…

handiwork  late 12c., from O.E. handgeweorc, from hand (n.) + geweorc, collective form of weorc "work" (see work). O.E. ge- regularly reduces to i- in Middle English, and the word probably came to be felt as handy + work.

Photograph courtesy of Kotomicreations.

Afwezig = Absent

Occasionally a Dutch word will pop into my head and I really don't know what it means or where it came from. Tonight's mystery word is 'afwezig' which means absent (German: abwesend).

I suppose listening to Dutch radio stations does me some good after all!

Antonym: aanwezig.

Graag...

'Graag' (more or less 'gladly') is a tricky word for me to pronounce and I'm guessing it's tricky for lots of native English speakers. The switch from an whispered 'h' sound (ɣ) to an r then back to ɣ is tricky so I asked my Flemish buddy what his tongue was doing. Mine goes from being flat in the mouth to the top of the mouth (as English speakers tend to do when pronouncing r) whereas his stayed flat throughout! He did warn me that his way of saying it may be a Brussels accent but it has to be better then mine!

From now on I'll try to keep my tongue down (and slightly back) throughout the pronunciation.

Out of interest graag seems to have the same root as 'greedy' in English:
Graag: From Middle Dutch gradig (“desirous, willing”), from Old Dutch *grādag (“desirous, hungry”)
Cognate withOld Saxon grādag (“hungry”), Old High German grātag (“greedy, thirsty, gaping”), Old English grǣdig (“greedy, hungry, covetous, eager”). (reference here)

Geld Nodig? Afhalen.

'Halen' is a useful and much used word, it seems, in Dutch.

Here it's used as 'afhalen' which means to withdraw (it can also mean pick up, right Dutch speakers?).

But ophalen means to pick up (or collect)

Have fun with other composed words:

overhalen (to persuade)
inhalen (to overtake)
any more?

And of course we can't end the post without trying to give a tip on remembering this word. Well I associate 'halen' with the English verb 'to hail' (as in a cab). This works well to help me remember what halen means (linked to 'to fetch' or to command') but I don't know whether there is an etymological link.

The boss!

From your supervisor to Bruce Springsteen we're used to the word 'boss' in English. It's the person in charge. The chief. The order giver…and such an English word!

Such an English word that I was intrigued to learn that 'baas' in Dutch has a similar meaning. They sound similar, but surely they can't be related? Let me check.

boss = baas

In fact I learned it in the context of huisbaas (lit. house boss) or landlord in English. So after a quick internet search found that, yes indeed, they are related. Not only that but etymologically speaking Dutch is the baas over boss…

Boss,n.
"overseer," 1640s, Amer.Eng., from Du. baas "a master," M.Du. baes, of obscure origin.


Further digging found this article which tells of baas as a great Dutch export.


"Variations on the Dutch word baas can be found in 57 other world languages, making it the most widely adopted Dutch word, according to Leiden researcher Nicoline van der Sijs.

'We have to conclude that the Dutch and Flemish were happy to be the boss, on ships and plantations and the like,’ Van der Sijs says"