Hacker News Reader

Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

As a Norwegian, I always found Dutch interesting. It is just close enough, that I can read it and get the gist of the message, without actually knowing Dutch. It is much easier than, say, German.

I read the message as: "We must not carelessly introduce errors to a program, but rather systematically and with care"

The joke being that we introduce the errors systematically and with care.

View on HN

There is something about Norwegian that makes it more easy to understand than any other Germanic language (besides English I guess, but that's just because we're broiled in it from early age). It somehow stayed more close to the shared Germanic than German itself?

Also: most Norwegians have very little accent when speaking English, unless they're in some kind of satiric Viking series.

That is a perfect translation!

A a Dutch guy, I have the same with Norwegian, Swedish and maybe Danish: I can skim the headlines in newspapers and figure out what it's about.

It's definitely quite readable. Good luck trying to figure out what a Dane is saying though.

I think Danish and Dutch are much closer phonetically than Dutch is to any of the other two, so I'm not sure that overused meme applies in this case.

Dutch and Danish share heritage via Frysian and Saxon (English) heritage. IIRC the Frysian lived among the whole coast of North Sea from Holland till North-West Germany, and then enclaves in Denmark, too.

Dutch is a Franconian dialect though? They just didn’t go through the consonant shift like their cousins in the Rhineland. It isn’t really that closely related to Frisian or Low German and even less so to Norther Germanic.

Moin?

Was watching Bron/The Bridge some time ago. Danish sounds like gibberish indeed, but then again "We hebben een serieus probleem" was a meme a little while back.

It's called being mutually intelligible, which is when languages share enough words/sentence structure that you can understand the meaning of a sentence even if you can't directly translate it.

How much German do you know? As a Norwegian Dutch is completely Greek to me. I did take German in school although none of it stuck besides some pointless(in isolation) grammar rules.

Also Norwegian, and I'm with the person above, but I think it depends a lot on your Norwegian dialect, maybe? The more towards conservative bokmål you get, or even exposure to older Danish, the easier both Dutch and German gets. I think reading a lot of pre-WW1 novels helped my German quite a bit.

I'll note the biggest reason why Dutch may seem somewhat closer than modern German is that modern German is mostly High (Southern) German. Low German common in the Northern parts of Germany before lies closer to the continuum between Dutch and the Scandinavian languages (for example it didn't got through the same consonant shift and still has Dag for day/dag instead of Tag).

There are many words in Dutch that you might recognize as similar to Norwegian that you might be marginally more likely to fail to recognise in modern German because the spelling is slightly more different.

> is that modern German is mostly High (Southern) German

Absolutely not. South german is for me Badisch, Schwäbisch, Bayrisch und Alemannisch (Badian, Swabian, Bavarian and Alemmannian --- similar to Swabian, but with lots of differences, e.g. we have "gwä-Schwaben" und "xsi-Schwaben".

But perhaps my other understanding stems from the fact the "Hochdeutsch" (high german) can mean different things. E.g. the german wikipedia has a disambiguation page https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochdeutsch for it.

I interpreted it to be the "normal" german we all speak if we don't speak a german dialect. Or, in other words, the first link of that disambiguation page: standard german. And that is a result of some "norming process", initiated mostly by the brothers Grimm, i.E. they wrote the first generally accepted german dictionary. Generally we can say that this process started in the 17th century, with it's high in the 18th. So it's quite modern, long after dialects formed.

And they didn't life and work in southern Germany, but quite in the center, the area between Hanau and Göttingen. If we look for dialects there, when we see that they are influenced by frankonian and saxonian dialect --- not the modern day Saxonia, but the historical one. The border between both empires goes right through the working area of the Grimms, e.g. the german town "Frankfurt" has a "Sachsenhausen" at the over side of the river. Or north of Marburg you have "Frankenberg" and "Frankenau" but also "Sachsenberg" and another "Sachsenhausen". These old kingdoms created language differences ... but they have nothing to do with southern german dialects / languages.

However, the various "Plattdeutsch" dialects like Plattduitsk or Frisian are totally different, here you're correct. They are categorized usually as "lower german" (Platt => flat => lower), North See Germanic, West Germanic, Germanic, Indogermanic.

From my perspective South of the North sea coast is South ;) I'll agree it's not precise, but both links on the disambiguation page to my eye justifies my use of it, at least in this context.

I'm certainly willing to accept that there may well be significant aspects of standard German that incorporates more central and Northern dialects and deviates from the southern Hochdeutsch dialects in ways I have no idea about. I'm sure you know far better than me about that.

But the most relevant differences in the context of my comment was the High German consonant shift, the effects of which is one (of several, sure) big change separating Standard German from the other Germanic languages, and which was mostly firmly happening further South than Plattdeutsch/Niederdeutsch/Low German.

In that respect at least, standard German orthography is closer to that of South/Hochdeutsch, and it has separated German further from the rest of the Germanic languages.

E.g. compare:

* Day: dag (Scandinavian, Dutch), Dag (low German languages), Tag Standard and High German.

* Ship: skip (Norwegian, Swedish) , skib (Danish), Skip/Schip/Schipp/Schepp (various lower German variants, Frisian), Schiff (Standard and High German)

* Apple: eple, Appel, vs. Apfel

* two: to (Norwegian, Danish, två (Swedish, Norwegian dialects), twee (Dutch, lower German), zwei (Standard and High German)

That makes some sense to me, my dialect is somewhere in the Nordmørsk-Trøndersk spectrum.

Dutch isn’t a low German though dialect? It’s more closely related to Franconian and Middle German than to Frisian and Low German

The point is that Dutch has a lot of features that is shared with both low German and Scandinavian languages but that has disappeared from modern standard German, not that it has always been more similar to low German than to other German dialects.

E.g. like low German and most of the other West and North Germanic languages, Dutch did not go through the High German Consonant Shift, but modern standard German "imported" that.

That makes modern German a lot harder to read for Scandinavians in ways that Dutch simply isn't.

I often find it easier to read Dutch despite never having learnt it than I find reading German despite having had three years of German lessons in school.

And if you start digging into the shared vocabulary between Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, you'll find a whole lot of those words are words that have retained far more similarity to the low German dialects than the Scandinavian languages have to standard German.

See also my other comment on this, with some comparisons.

Note that this does also not necessarily go both ways - I'm totally willing to accept that you might find high German more similar than low German from your perspective because of different subsets of shared vocabulary or structure, for example.

I had German in HS, but only first year - and completely bombed that. But I guess it could have been enough to influence my understanding.

That said, I find Dutch much, much easier to read.

EDIT:

"We mogen niet uit nonchalance fouten in een programma aanbrengen. Dat moeten we systematisch en met zorg doen.".

First sentence

We = vi

mogen = må

niet = ikke (from knowing German)

nonchalance = nonsjalant = skjødesløs = slurvete

in = i

een = en

programma = program

aanbrengen = anbringe = bringe = innføre

The only word I didn't really recognize was "fouten".

So, roughly that reads as "vi må ikke på slurvete vis (something) til et program innføre", which isn't really how we structure sentences in Norway.

But it gives enough context and clues, that we shouldn't introduce something negative to a program through carelessness / sloppines.

Second sentence

Dat = da

moten = må

we = vi

systematich = systematisk

en = guessed either "en" or "and", where the latter made more sense.

med = med

zorg = I guessed "sorg", but turns out it meant "omhu".

doen = gjøre

Second sentence first read "Det må vi systematisk og med [noen] gjøre". Whic, again, isn't a typical Norwegian structured.

"Det må vi gjøre systematisk og med omhu".

That is at least how I read the original text. Some words are difficult because they don't seem to be loanwords from neither English or German.

I find it very amusing to see this topic discussed in such detail on HN. I was born in the Netherlands, and moved to Norway in my teens.

>The only word I didn't really recognize was "fouten".

It might be easiest to map it to the word "fault" in English.

FYI: 'fouten' means 'errors'

Norwegian coming up with a better translation than other native Dutch speakers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com