Re: NATLANG: Dutch (jara: Has anyone made a real conlang?)
| From: | Herman Miller <hmiller@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, April 25, 2003, 3:16 |
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On Thu, 24 Apr 2003 05:11:25 +0100, Jan van Steenbergen
<ijzeren_jan@...> wrote:
>Wow Herman, ik ben onder de indruk! Mijn complimenten! ;)
Dank! Helaas, het meeste van wat ik weet zijn dingen zoals "steek de fakkel
aan en ga de deur door". (Those separable prefixes can be tricky!)
>"als" is absolutely not incorrect, but "wanneer" still has my preference. It's
>the same thing with "if" and "when", I guess.
Hmm... I wouldn't have thought to use "wanneer". I guess you _could_ use
"when" in English in situations like this, but it's not the first word that
comes to mind. I'll have to watch out for this word.
>"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.
I guess that's the downside of knowing a little German; I need to unlearn a
few things. But at least I got the basic idea of putting the verb at the
end right.
>"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.
The hazards of using a dictionary. I didn't know how to say "at least", so
I looked it up. Both "tenminste" and "minstens" were glossed "at least",
without further explanation. So I chose the one that sounded more familiar.
What I should have done is look it up in the Ocarina of Time walkthrough to
get a better context!
>BTW a possibly better choice would have been "althans" instead of "tenminste".
And that one's also glossed "at least", with no clarification. Wouldn't it
be nice if dictionaries had sample sentences for each word? I'll have to
keep that in mind while I'm working on Lindiga. At least I'll try not to
confuse the different meanings of "at least" in my definitions!
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