Translations

I thought I would post some representative selections from 100 Praatjes, the community's bi-weekly newsletter. These are rough translations done with the aid of BabelFish and then cleaned up with some Anglicized embellishments, so bear with me.

Ahem.

• A stomach virus or flu has spread throughout the Father House. This just in! You're in good hands!
• Veronica, Charmala and Favourleen are moving soon to #87 across the street.
• Br. Luc stole a mouse from Magi the cat. He quickly put it outside.
• Meta has only three boxes left to unpack in her new flat!
• The Florentinus family has a new puppy, Simson.
• Jorine and Anne have a secret career playing Black Petes.
• Zr. Rosaliene and Br. Sjoerd are expecting a baby! The future little brother or sister of Muriel will be born in May if things go according to plan.
• The engine of Eric Jan's boat was fished from the canal by the fire department, in exchange for three apple pies.
• Do you want to try out the Tom-Toms? Br. Sjoerd is looking for help!

Just another couple weeks in the life of the community!

Anne dressed up as Black Pete for a trip to the local kindergarten!

Yours truly was one of the lucky ones to fall under the influence of the dread stomach virus, so I apologize for the dearth of posting around here. Plus, it's just been stinkin' busy.

Poor Meta, who was teased above so mercilessly about unpacking, is actually my own personal Angel of Dutch. She's been a professional Dutch/English translator for a long time, with a comprehensive mastery of both languages. We discovered we enjoy talking about language with each other, and she offered to give me some Dutch lessons!

I can't even describe how helpful this has been. I knew that lessons would be very much preferable to the slow, haphazard way I was picking up the language, but I didn't realize how lost in the forest I was until she appeared between the trees holding a lantern. I've also acquired some more professional learning materials through the generosity of the Mission House, and so I now feel that there's some real direction to my study.

That said, some days progress feels slow! And while I certainly no so much more than when I first arrived here, the truth is that it often seems I'm simply becoming more aware of my total ignorance about this language!

Don't get me wrong, the similarities to English are there. Old English, that is! For any given Dutch word, there seems to be about a 50% chance that you can find its analog in some Engels word that has fallen out of favor since Shakespeare's day. Some words are almost identical: op means 'up', huis means 'house', vader means 'father'. Still more are easily recognizable once you figure out the pronunciation: uit looks quite alien, but in reality it's pronounced identically to 'out', which is what it means.

But, as I said, more words still are just old. For instance, vast means fixed. Doesn't sound like English, huh? But wait. In Nederlands a 'v' sounds a lot like an 'f'. So you can pronounce it 'fast'. Have you ever heard of 'making something fast'? That's an old way of saying, yes, to fix in place. Another example I've noticed is jongen, a word for 'boy'. 'J' in Dutch gets the 'y' treatment, so this winds up sounding a lot like 'young'un', an old-fashioned word if ever there was one.

I could go on, but I'll spare you.

The trick is that Dutch grammar is just as old as its vocabulary and so it can be very Yoda-like.

To give you an idea I've played the traditional auto-translation game with a paragraph of text. I put it through Babelfish in English to Dutch, then translated the resulting Dutch to English. Here's what I got:

Last night I did the bread run. I road to the bakery on my bike and picked up a bag of the day's left over bread. Then I pedaled home across the canals with a bag of bread balanced carefully on the rear of my bike. I felt very European!

Last night did I the bread course. I gone taken to bakery on my bicycle and a pocket of day's leave concerning bread. Then pedaled I house concerning the canals with a pocket bread carefully balanced on the after part of my bicycle. I felt very European!

If one ignores the garbled word choices (Babel Fish seems to have trouble reading its own writing) you'll note that some weird things are happening with the verbs and the word order. Dutch grammar is very particular about where you put things, but at the same time it's less straightforward than English's subject-verb-whatever structure.

Sigh. Well, they do say it's easier than German*.

I'm by no means conversational in the language, although depending on the subject matter I might be able to get an idea of what's being spoken about. I've also stumbled my way through a couple halting conversations with a three-year-old girl. Specifically, I told her that I eat little girls. At least, I hope that's what I told her. She giggled.

* The Germans I've spoken to deny this.