Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

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Its like german but with english syntax

I don't want to be too pedantic, but it's not. Dutch syntax is very similar to German, both are typically analyzed as an SOV (subject-object-verb) language with movement of the finite verb to the V2 position in declarative main clauses, unlike English.

Word order of Dutch and German clauses (+ some other Germanic languages) are typically described in terms of topological fields [1] and Dutch and German have very similar (albeit not the same) topological field constraints, leading to very similar word orders. Like German, Dutch has grammatical genders (three like German, though only two are distinguished in definite articles), similar verb conjugation, etc.

People are often led to believe that Dutch is more similar to English because it doesn't have overt case marking.

[1] Simplified, a clause is partitioned into a vorfeld, mittelfeld, and nachfeld by the so-called brackets, which are the V2 and verb cluster positions.

I'm Dutch, I live in Germany. The language and grammar are different enough that I struggle with German. Dutch dialects in the north of the country are very similar across the border.

There's also the notion that the Dutch grammar has been changed quite a bit over the years and used to resemble German a lot more. Mostly things are a lot simpler these days than they used to be. Older Dutch texts are hard to read even for Dutch people. Even texts from the 19th century look very different from modern Dutch.

Finally, the reason English speakers recognize a lot of Dutch words is because a lot of English words actually have Dutch origins. For example, the word cookie is a bastardized form of the Dutch koekje. Especially a lot of naval jargon comes straight from Dutch. The reason for this is long trade relations, colonizing the same places (e.g. New York used to be New Amsterdam), etc. There even was a Dutch king on the British throne in the seventeenth century.

I'm Dutch, I live in Germany. The language and grammar are different enough that I struggle with German.

Well, it's another language... there is always going to be a learning curve, especially beyond a certain age. My wife is German and picked up Dutch pretty quickly. Vice versa, I lived in Germany for five years and even though I barely put in any effort (and we speak Dutch at home), I found German fairly easy to pick up.

There's also the notion that the Dutch grammar has been changed quite a bit over the years and used to resemble German a lot more.

That's certainly true for case marking (with which Dutch often struggle with when speaking German), but again in terms of word order, grammatical gender, etc. they are still very similar and certainly more similar than Engish and Dutch are.

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English is much easier than German for most Dutch people for various reasons, including: more years of English education (starting during primary education, being mandatory up to VWO 6); subtitled movies; continuous exposure to English through media, internet, etc. The generation of my grandparents were often much better at German than English, they had a lot more exposure to German radio/television, travel was much less international, so they'd usually go to Germany, Belgium, or France when going abroad, etc.

Half German half Afrikaans, Dutch is easy and it's horrifying how bad native English speakers are at just one language.

It is lol. Meanwhile we mainland Europeans have to grow up at least bilingual

What book would you recommend to start to best understand the way you described the differences and similarities between the languages? It really is a very nice post and I’d like to thank you for it.

A linguist could probably come up with a good reference for a comparative work. I mostly had to dig into some of this stuff when working on Dutch and German NLP, but I am by no means a linguist. For Dutch I found this book very helpful:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/syntax-of-dutch/FB5E136...

It also has comparisons to German spread throughout the book. (Full disclosure: former colleague of mine.)

If you can read Dutch, the E-ANS is also a very valuable resource:

https://e-ans.ivdnt.org/topics/pid/ans21lingtopic

E.g., description of topological fields:

https://e-ans.ivdnt.org/topics/pid/ans21010101lingtopic

https://e-ans.ivdnt.org/topics/pid/ans21010102lingtopic

The field of study is called linguistic typology.

During my linguistic studies, the course material was comprised of the Oxford and Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology (and a bunch of papers on specific linguistic features). But the Oxford handbook is a very good start.

It's a very cool field of study that will allow you to identify commonalities across languages and the differences between them. A good typologist should be able the be dropped in a completely unknown language context and learn the features from use (which was basically our exam).

I only speak English (and a few foreign fightin' words) and yet, I understood (I think) the meaning of "vorfeld, mittelfeld, and nachfeld" way easier than "the V2 and verb cluster positions".

Maybe I should just learn Dutch and dump English?

Vorfeld, Mittelfeld and Nachfeld look more like German.

Yes, these are German words. Much of the early topological field literature was by German linguists, so it's common to use the German words.

Also see eigenvector etc.

What realm of science are we? Linguistic or math?

Point stands though. Voorveld, middenveld, achterveld works in Dutch. Don't know what these German words technically mean and so they might have a different translation, but you can / it is common to make this type of compound.

Achterveld works in some German dialects !

According to <https://www.dict.cc/?s=achter>, not only is it northern german, but also "sailor language"! :D English is similar, having "aft" for sailors to say "rear". I know boat people have specialized terms but never thought of it as sailor speak but rather like any other jargon. For some odd reason, the dictcc page also mentions the random fun fact that "achter" is Afrikaans, ignoring where Afrikaans got it from (or rather, who forced it upon them)

A nitpick, but Dutch nor German is an SOV language. That's a crazy notion that Chomskians had to invent by way of cognitive dissonance reduction.

But Dutch is very similar to German, indeed, and both are also similar to Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.

Coming from a quantum physics point of view, it is very strange to see the term "topological fields" in this context !

Do you have recommended references about these grammatical constructs ?

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