NATLANG: Dutch (jara: Has anyone made a real conlang?)

 --- Herman Miller skrzypszy:

> Maar het Nederlands is geen moeilijke taal te leren, als men Engels spreken
> kan, en iets over Duits weet. (Minstens is het niet te moeilijk te _lezen_.
> Het _schrijven_ is helemaal niet zo gemakkelijk!)
Wow Herman, ik ben onder de indruk! Mijn complimenten! ;)

> Corrections to my first attempt at writing Dutch would be appreciated. :-)
Oh, I absolutely didn't need the English translation. If this was really your
first attempt, then I'm anxious to see your second :) . There are a few very
small things that are not exactly _wrong_, but just would never be used by a
Dutch person. Let's say, it could be the work of an immigrant who has lived
here for twelve years already.

I'll just repeat the sentence the way I would have written it:

"Maar het Nederlands is geen moeilijke taal om te leren wanneer men Engels kan
spreken en iets over Duits weet (het is tenminste niet moeilijk te _lezen_;
_schrijven_ is helemaal niet zo gemakkelijk!)"

A few details:

"om" is a difficult word. Basically, it means "in order to", or simply "to".
Dutch people tend to overuse it. I would say "moeilijk te leren", but: "een
moeilijke taal om te leren" ;) .

"als" is absolutely not incorrect, but "wanneer" still has my preference. It's
the same thing with "if" and "when", I guess.

"spreken kan": this is German word order. In Dutch, the rule is that in
subordinate clauses the auxiliaries come first, and the actual thing comes
last. What you wrote is not forbidden, but "kan spreken" definitely sounds more
Dutch.

"minstens" means "at least", in the sense of: GREATER THAN OR EQUAL TO. A
synonym is "ten minste", written as two words. But when you want to use "at
least" to illustrate the fact that the sentence is an elaboration or
explanation of the previous sentence, you write "tenminste" (written as one
word). Needless to add that this is one of those things that a vast majority of
native speakers make mistakes with.
BTW a possibly better choice would have been "althans" instead of "tenminste".

> Personally, I think it would be really cool to see more conlang sites in
> Dutch, Swedish, French, Spanish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Hokkien, and all the
> other conlangers' native languages out there. I think conlangers are more
> likely than random web surfers to have an interest in reading (or at least
> looking at) web sites in different languages. I'll occasionally go around
> searching for Latin names of animals specifically to find non-English
> sites.
Well, that depends on how interesting a language it to me. When a grammar is
written in Finnish, I can still enjoy the tables, but I completely fail to
understand the explanations. I find that frustrating.

Jan

=====
"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones

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