Re: "Dutch English"; language death on Phalera [was Re: Active and Passive please help]

Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Quoting Almaran Dungeonmaster <dungeonmaster@...>:
>
> > Padraic Brown wrote:
> > > It might be a little hard, since "to be called" in the current
> > > > meaning is inherently passive in English.
> > > > However, other  languages have an active verb for naming things.
> > >
> > Hunh? What's wrong with "I called it X" in your dialect?
> >
> > Well, my dialect is nether-english (which is the english spoken by
> > people whose first language is Dutch). But you're right of course,
> > "to call" in the meaning of "to name" is also possible in the active
> > voice in english.
>
> Which brings up an interesting question:  how many people from the
> Netherlands speak English in their daily life?  IIRC, something like
> 80% of people there can speak *some*, at least.
I speak English daily: it's the offial language of my company, and
besides, my office-mate is an Bangladeshi-American woman (married
to a Greek), and it's only courteous to give her a chance to understand
the conversation.

Add to that the the daily thousand words I post on Usenet and stuff
like that, and the novel I'm writing, the fact that the newspaper
is about the only bit of Dutch I regularly read, and you can imagine
that sometimes _Dutch_ feels like a second language.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.valdyas.org