Dear dutch People, why is your language like this?

by thecamp2000

39 comments
  1. Your german you cant act like your language is any better

    Rauchen ist tötlich

  2. it actually feels like someone took swedish and ran it through a woodchipper cause i can read it but it just makes me giggle.

  3. what’s so funny about this? The word ‘Dodelijk’?
    ‘ij’ is a vowel here that never got a proper digital representation because we were content with making it ‘ij’ instead of something closely resembling **Ÿ**.

  4. “Smoking is deadly – stop now”
    How is that any better? If you wanna complain about stupid languages, just look at the French variant

    “fumer est mortel – arrêtez maintenant”

  5. Dutch is charming. I wish I’d have ended up in the timeline where you have a Norddeutsche Föderation, with Lübeck Low German as the standard language. We’d be much closer to our polder spamming swamp brothers and the Southerners could hate on us Saupraißn from the outside.

    Instead I was marooned here, in a line that’s marked with three clowns in Teagard’s Time Traveller’s Guide

  6. As an Italian learning Dutch,I admit that once you get used to it and start talking ,ladies speaking Dutch are sexy as hell and it’s a really interesting language with a lot of words and ways of saying that express a lot of different feelings. Stay away from Moroccans speaking Dutch tho,horrible

  7. the joke is that it’s someone from Germany when German literally sounds the same, the difference is that people have heard German before but have never heard Dutch before and then think Dutch sounds weird.

  8. [The Hague](https://www.der-postillon.com/2018/05/niederlaendisch.html) (dpo) – Many have long suspected it, but now it’s official: the Dutch language was never seriously intended for interpersonal communication. Instead, it is an elaborate joke with which the inhabitants of the region west of North Rhine-Westphalia wanted to poke fun at the Germans. In fact, the Dutch speak perfectly normal German with each other, as the government in The Hague admitted today.

    “We’ve all had our fun, but now it’s time to stop,” explained Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in perfect German at a press conference this afternoon. “We enjoyed laughing at the stupid expressions on the faces of the Germans, who made an effort to take our jokes seriously. But even the best joke has to come to an end.”

    As Rutte acknowledged, the Dutch first began to make fun of visitors from Germany in the 17th century by pretending to speak their own language based on the bastardisation of German words. In addition to their own amusement, the aim of the action was to ensure that the Dutch no longer had to converse with the “Duitsers” (one of the first documented words of the fantasy language), who were considered unpleasant and intrusive.

    This painting by the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer van Delft shows a typical everyday scene from this period:

    After a few decades, the running gag had taken on a life of its own. Practically all Dutch people joined in and quickly switched to their self-invented gibberish as soon as they met Germans. Even street signs were adapted and libraries filled with books.

    In the 1930s, efforts were made for the first time to stop the elaborate fun, but these plans were cancelled by the Second World War.

    It was only today, another 70 years later, that the Dutch government decided to come clean in the interests of international understanding and put an end to the crude joke.

    Shortly after Rutte’s declaration, linguists from the University of Rotterdam published the most important rules that the Dutch had been using to poke fun at the Germans for so long:

    – Dutch words must sound as silly as possible to Germans (example: “bromfiets” for “moped”, “bollen” for “balls”, “sputteren” for “spit”, “piepschuim” for “polystyrene”, “oorkussen” for “pillow”, “olifant” for “elephant”).

    – If two Dutch people are talking to each other while a German is within earshot, they will only speak gibberish.

    – If a German tries to read a Dutch word out loud, his pronunciation is always corrected, if necessary with a random, spontaneously invented sound.

    – Dutch people always have to claim that they understand German but cannot speak it; instead, they usually converse with Germans in English.

    Towards the end of the press conference, a German journalist asked the Dutch Prime Minister whether feelings of inferiority in view of the inferiority of Dutch football compared to German football could have played a role in the age-old joke. Rutte replied, visibly angry: “Wat een grap! De persconferentie is voorbij! Everything that I show is not right.”

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