Re: Dutch [was Re: French pronunciation (Was: Re: Fw: [wika] Boreanesian)]

At 03:27 23/05/00 EDT, you wrote:
>>
>    My ex-housemate, Yuri , is a veteran of Afghanistan (he was
Spetznaz/KGB).
>Yuri is fluent in 19 languages. One of the languages he is fluent as a native
>is Dutch cuz the Soviets trained his unit to be ready to invade the
>Netherlands. His unit was to seize Amsterdam & hamper NATO forces. But then
>the Afghan War came up...
>    Anyways he defected during that nasty conflict.
>    Our neighbors in Houston were two Dutch guys. They swore Yuri was a
>Dutchman pretending to be Russian at first. They couldn't believe how well
>Yuri could speak Dutch... even do complicated word-play in Dutch that even
>native speakers had trouble with.
>    Evidently Dutch is a fun language for word-play, but difficult at certain
>points even for native speakers.
>
I believed so, but it's nice to have an exterior confirmation. Dutch is
really an interesting language. It's grammar is not really difficult, and
quite European, but everything that resorts more to lexicon and semantics
is really different from every other languages I know. I've just learned
something more yesterday, about Flemish (the Belgian dialect of Dutch): in
Belgium, you cannot say "Ik hou van jou" to mean "I love you". Instead, you
use an expression which is /ikzi.uGre:x/ which is written in Holland's
Dutch as "Ik zie jou graag": "I like to see you". Funny that an expression
which sounds nearly like an insult to me (for me, "I like to see you" means
more or less: "well, you're nice-looking but thre's nothing else in you
that could interest me". Of course, it depends on the context but it
certainly never means "I love you") is so strong as "I love you" for
Flemish people.

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)