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Post by pieter on Nov 22, 2019 17:27:28 GMT -7
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Post by karl on Nov 22, 2019 20:28:42 GMT -7
Pieter I do think you have struck the nail upon the head this for sure with your videos. For one what Austrian think of German was very well on, for this was my impression also. But then we are grouping all Austrians in one basket, for also was my self to once meet for a short time, some very nice people. But for the most part, I was uncomfortable and more or less was careful with those I was to meet. This also was some years past whilst on my motorcyle at that time, and yes, whilst on the A10, certainly was a speeder I guess as guilty as accused. For why not, I only had but a few days to use and time was precious. My motorcycle was a new at that time, 1973 BMW R90: The photo is American, but display very exact what it was except mine had a nice windscreen and rear carry rack. bringatrailer.com/listing/1976-bmw-r90-6-4/After leaving Munchen,was to cross over the border on A10 to by pass Salsburg with my goal to reach for a visit of Berchtesgaden but gave up with shortage of time and in stead stayed over for two days in Villach. There was some very nice people and was invited to stay in a private home of some elderly couple renting the upper room of their home to travellors such as my self by the day. Speaking of tight together people there, if I think a bird was to poop on some ones roof, the entire village would know and talk about it for a month, every one there seemed to know the other. It was a wonder the paint on my motorcycle stayed black with all the eyes looking at it... I did enjoy the two days in Villach and was a little sad upon leaving very early morning on the third day. Karl
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Post by pieter on Nov 23, 2019 6:36:52 GMT -7
Karl,
The Netherlands sometines already appears to be something like the Tower of Babel. In Amsterdam I was spoken to several times in English or German by Dutch people in shops, bars, restaurants or at seminars, workshops or congresses. I do believe that I look more like a brunette Austrian, Pole, American or a German than a Dutchman.
Only when I reply in civilized Standard Dutch without an accent they realise I am a Dutchman. I am not blond, have no blue eyes, and for some reason don’t look Dutch. Maybe I have some slavic elements and Spanish or French or jewish elements via my Dutch family.
My Dutch grandmother had black hair and black eyes and my father and Dutch aunt (the sister of my dad) are also dark. Many Dutch people have French Huguenot or Spanish blood (from the Spanish occupation in the 16th and 17th centuries).
My sister has blue eyes and blond hair. I do believe that that comes from the Polish side. She is a Slavic Dutch blond.
Cheers, Pieter
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Post by pieter on Nov 23, 2019 16:13:50 GMT -7
Karl,
Your story of Villach could be somewhere in a rural area in the Netherlands with some distance to the larger cities or the densly populated West (Holland region) and Centre (Utrecht). The isolated Calvinist Zeeland Peninsula with their strict fundamentalist Orthodox Protestant Puritanical village communities with a lot of social control. Watching every step the neighbour does. If he cleans his car on sunday, gardens or has some visible hobby activity inside his house. The same could be taken place in Catholic villages in the South-Eastern Limburg bordering Germany or Belgium. Narrow minded localism. Pear pressure, the controlling force of localism. You should be a local, speak the local dialect, act like a local, know local customs, traditions, heritages, tales, stories, folklore and exactly who is who to fit in. Behind their curtains people are peaking at neighbors and strangers. In the local church, shops, supermarkets, pubs (cafê’s), hang outs, bakeries with a coffee corner the locals exchange gossip, stories, the local news. A small and isolated world that is.
The same is the case unfortunately in some migrant communities in getto’s where family honor, clan mentality and extreme social control of large (Turkish/Moroccan) families and mosque communities rule.
That’s why I prefer larger Dutch cities or tows that are less isolated, more open minded and less traditional, old fashioned and controlling. I don’t blame these locals in rural area’s but pity the independent, autonomous, Free thinking and creative minds in such places who must have a hard time, because they know no other life.
Some Free spirits, Free birds, escape to a larger city or move abroad to another country to start something over there as the inventive, creative and commercial clever Dutchmen they are. Or as specialists, scientists, craftsman, farmers, horeca people, diplomats, development aid workers, employees of the UN, the World Bank, IMF, Unilever, Shell or one of the larger Dutch banks.
People who left their rural, local, regional communities and families often alienated themselves of that past, their family and communities and started their own families as newcomers in the cities or foreign countries. (USA, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Dubai, Israel, South-Africa, New Zealand and sometimes even Poland, the Ukraine or Russia.) In the secularization process many abandoned or left their Calvinism (Reformed or Dutch Reformed faith) or Roman-Catholic faith. Others are conservative Calvinist Dutch Americans or traditional Dutch farmers in Southern America.
Cheers, Pieter
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Post by Jaga on Nov 25, 2019 20:00:26 GMT -7
Pieter, for me you don't look completely Polish but rather Dutch. Dutch people are not all blond like Swedes or Danish... besides I see you as a representative of Polish Dutch, with the emphasis on Dutch. I realize that Netherlands is more complicated that what we think after visiting Amsterdam... Karl, The Netherlands sometines already appears to be something like the Tower of Babel. In Amsterdam I was spoken to several times in English or German by Dutch people in shops, bars, restaurants or at seminars, workshops or congresses. I do believe that I look more like a brunette Austrian, Pole, American or a German than a Dutchman. Only when I reply in civilized Standard Dutch without an accent they realise I am a Dutchman. I am not blond, have no blue eyes, and for some reason don’t look Dutch. Maybe I have some slavic elements and Spanish or French or jewish elements via my Dutch family. My Dutch grandmother had black hair and black eyes and my father and Dutch aunt (the sister of my dad) are also dark. Many Dutch people have French Huguenot or Spanish blood (from the Spanish occupation in the 16th and 17th centuries). My sister has blue eyes and blond hair. I do believe that that comes from the Polish side. She is a Slavic Dutch blond. Cheers, Pieter
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Post by Jaga on Nov 25, 2019 20:04:46 GMT -7
Pieter, referring to comparison of Germanic languages - I could only understand German and English... as for Slavic, I could understand almost all of them....for you and Karl it is probably easier to understand all the Germanic languages. Which one, except English would be the most difficult or different for you to understand?
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Post by Jaga on Nov 25, 2019 20:15:08 GMT -7
Pieter,
referring to REAL Silesian dialect - it has much more german words than showed on these videos.
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Post by pieter on Nov 27, 2019 14:22:53 GMT -7
Pieter, referring to comparison of Germanic languages - I could only understand German and English... as for Slavic, I could understand almost all of them....for you and Karl it is probably easier to understand all the Germanic languages. Which one, except English would be the most difficult or different for you to understand? Jaga, For me the Luxemburg, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish languages are hard to understand. Also some heavy German dialects and regional languages are hard to understand. For instance Swiss German, but like Karl I also don’t understand some Austrian words or expressions/sayings. I don’t understand the South-Western Kerkrade dialect ( such a heavy mix of German and Dutch dialects that I can’t understand it. Probably Karl wouldn’t understand it either). I can understand Dutch Frisian, but probably don’t understand Ost Frisian and North Frisian. The Saxon dialect or regional language will be difficult too and Plattdeutsch. I also have difficulties understanding heavy regional dialects or regional languages from the British isles. Some heave Celtic (Gealic) elements in their regional English versions. The Welsh language is Celtic. Scottish is English with heavy Scottish Celtic elements. But most difficult Germanic languages for me are the Scandinavian and Luxemburg languages. I can’t follow conversations or movies in these languages. Like I said before I understand the West Germanic Yiddish language partly due to the German words and sometimes sentences in German. The Hebrew and Slavic roots words and sentences inYiddish I do not understand. Cheers, Pieter
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Post by pieter on Nov 27, 2019 14:25:46 GMT -7
I watch Danish, Swedish and Norwegian movies and tv series with Dutch subtitles.
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Post by pieter on Nov 27, 2019 15:05:13 GMT -7
Jaga,
Thank you for being honest and direct. I like the fact that you consider me to look Dutch. Because my nationality, culture, identity, language and life is Dutch. Amsterdam is quite international and cosmopolitan. The city is used to the English, German, French, Italian, Irish accent (English), Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Japanese. (We have our China town in the Red Light district in the Zeedijk street and De Waag square). In Amsterdam there are quite a few South-American, Caribbean, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek folks next to the Moroccan and Turkish immigrants. I consider it funny when people speak English or in one occasion German to me in Amsterdam. Amsterdam. You are right that not all Dutch people are blond people with blue eyes like the Swedes or Danish. We have a lot of French, Spanish, Indonesian (Eurasian and Javanese), Walloon (Belgian), and some Polish (me for instance), Hungarian, Austrian and German influencee. Dutch people can be long, tall, blue eyed and blond like the Scandinavians, but also brunette and dark like the Alpine Bavarians and Austrians, the French or Italians. They can be dark (Black haired and with black eyes) like the Spanish, Portuguese, Armenians, Georgians or our Ashkenazi or Sephardic jews. Maybe a representative of the Polish Dutch is to much honor for me Jaga. I don’t speak, read or understand Polish, know very few Polish people (One Polish woman in Arnhem), and am not part of the Polish Diaspora in the Netherlands. I feel connected to Polish family and friends in Poland and my Polish American family. But I do not feel connected to the Polish diaspora in the Netherlands. Yes, I do feel Dutch. I am glad that you realized and realize that Netherlands is more complicated than what you thought after visiting Amsterdam.
The Netherlands is one of the most densly populated countries with a lot of different ethnic communities, cultures, religions, social codes, political and social dimensions. Maybe today new dialects, subgroups and regional languages exist due to migrant Dutch dialects and accents like Moroccan Dutch (with Berber and Arabic influences), the Turkish Dutch of Dutch Turks and the influence and new words Iranians, Kurds, Syrians, Iraqi people, Bosnians and Africans (Eritreans, Ethiopians, Somalians, Nigerians, Ghanese people) and the Afghan (Pastun, Deri, Tajik, Uzbek, Afghan Farsi of the Hazara) and Pakistani (also Pashtun and Urdu) accents, influences and loanwords.
In the past decades we got the words shoarma (shwarma), Shaslick, Kabab, Fallafel, Humus, Couscous, Souk, derwish, Sisha, halal (Islamic word for kosher), haram (not kosher), hookah, hadj, shirk, Alibabba, Mohammed, Ahmed, Aisha, Makkah (Mecca) and Baklava ( a rich, sweet dessert pastry made of layers of filo filled with chopped nuts and sweetened and held together with syrup or honey.)
The largest influence on Dutch via Apple, Microsoft, software & hardware, Facebook, YouTube, Hollywood, Walt Disney, the BBC, CNN, Fox News, Fox Sport, Al Jazeera English, Euronews and France 24 (English) is American and British english. Words as download or upload where no Dutch expressions are present to replace these English words. Sometimes we use Dutch versions of the English original, like ‘Surfen’ in staid of ‘Surfing’ the internet. Ofcourse most words and sentences are Dutch, but there are English, German and French loanwords in that. And next to that also Yiddish, Arabic, Persian and Turkish loanwords.
Cheers, Pieter
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Post by karl on Nov 27, 2019 15:51:07 GMT -7
Jaga
Of your question of languages my self do not understand covers a great deal of area. For one, of the Slavic languages, non that I understand for exception of a small number of Russian words to get by with.
My self am not very linguistic and have difficulty with some of the Southern areas such as Bavaria {Bayern}, if they stick to standard German, ok fine, but often as naught, many enjoy to use their local dialect and many of the words they use is very difficult to properly understand as for instance, if to provide instructions/directions it then becomes very difficult to understand. Other areas are such as the farming areas of Rheinland/Pfalz and the small area of Saarland. Even with using standard German, these farming folks can be difficult to properly understand.
In Mexico, the business people and those of higher education speak good Spanish and then my self receive laughing comments on my Rioplatense Spanish of Buenos Aires. It has a certain Italian taste to it and a bit Embarrassing at times. Many of the people living on the out skirts speak a mix of Indian and their brand of Spanish as if singing it, and that requires carefull listening to properly understand. Some of the Indians {every one is Spanish of course} that live in the out laying villages speak a brand of Indian words mixed with Spanish that is just not understand very well by my self.
Although my first marrage was to a Swiss, their brand of Swiss German is once again to take care in listen carefully. To this day, I hold a great dislike for Swiss Mountain music of their darn cows/mountains/alleys and yodeling. They enjoy to roll their Rs as if it was a national paste time. There again though, I am painting with a broad brush, their standard German that business people use, is fine.
Karl
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Post by pieter on Nov 27, 2019 17:11:53 GMT -7
Pieter, referring to REAL Silesian dialect - it has much more german words than showed on these videos. Jaga,
Nice reply. I thought so. I saw documentaries with Polish Dutch people who sang German songs and talked Polish with a lot of German in it. That must be the Silesian dialect. Some of them seemed to be more Pro-German (Deutschfreundlich) than Polonist/Pro-Polish. For me they are an inbetween people like we heave our inbetween people on the German border. People who speak their Dutch low Saxon dialect or regional language with very strong German influences.
Example near Arnhem in the Huissen Low Saxon dialect:
Sentence:
- English: I go to the baker to get me a sandwich
- Standard Dutch: Ik ga bij de bakker een broodje halen.
- Huissen (town near Arnhem in the Gelderland province) Low Saxon dialect; Ik geht naar de bakker een Brötchen halen.
- German: Ich hole mir ein Sandwich aus der Bäckerei
Below you hear some Kerkrade (Kerkrade dialect: Kirchroa; German: Kerkrade or Kirchrath) dailect of Kerkrade, a town and a municipality in the southeast of Limburg, the southernmost province of the Netherlands.
It is such a heavy dialect that I have no idea what this old comedian is talking about at that southeastern Carnaval in Kerkade in Limburg, at the German border near the German municipality Herzogenrath (s-Hertogenrade in Dutch and Herzeroa in Ripuarian; and Hertseraoj in Limburgish.)
Cheers, Pieter
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Post by pieter on Dec 22, 2019 5:39:26 GMT -7
I love this video and all video's of Easy German and Easy Polish. It is so funny that when I listen very carefully I can understand the Southern (Bavarian), Ost-Frisian and plattdeutsche and Sächsische (Saxon) dialects, because we have the same North-South and East-West division in the Netherlands. Even in the centre (Middle) of the Netherlands people speak with a different accent and dialect than in the West, East, North or South. Only when you are Dutch you can distuinghuish between for instance the Utrecht, Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, Groningen, Maastricht and Eindhoven city dialects. I also can understand Yiddish with great effort, but miss things in Yiddish when the West Germanic in it becomes to much mixed with Slavic and Hebrew. That is my language disability, the language border. The best thing would be to have a Czech, Polish or Slovak girlfriend. In that way I would reconnect to the Slavic world. Unfortunately my family today is a Dutch/English language family, and in social and professional connection I use German too. So I am locked in the West-Germanic world by work (profession), social life and family. My only Polish cousin is so excellent in British English that she speaks like an English woman when I have a phone call conversation with her. That is not strange, since she is an English teacher in Poland.
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Post by pieter on Dec 22, 2019 6:17:45 GMT -7
Karl,
To be honest, I got compliments for my German interviews with German farmers who came to Arnhem with their Dutch farmer brethern. But I myself considered my German (with the self critical inner sensor, critic and satirist) to be a terrible coal German. I like fluent German, but practice my German to little, because the Dutch and English language (British, South-African English and American English of my American cousins and our dear fellow Forum members) are more dominant. Some people dislike German language, culture and music, but I love German literature, Kultur, poetry and music (From Bach and Beethoven to the Kölschrockband BAP).
In this Europe of growing nationalism, provincialism, regionalism, localism, xenophobia and ethnocentrism I feel more and more cosmopolitian with my mixed heritage and world family. In the cultural, musical, poetic, cinematographic, tv and photography world I come from there are no borders in technology, press & media development and mentality. But fact is, and you don't hear that in the media or press, that there are also rightwing populist, conservative and nationalist alternative media, press and spokes people.
The growing nationalism, regionalism , localism and city patriotism strenghens both national languagues on one side and the regional languages (Kashubian and Silesian for instance and Sorbian in Eastern--Germany) and the dialects. You could conside the Netherlands like the old United Provinces of the Netherlands, or simply United Provinces (officially the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands), commonly referred to historiographically as the Dutch Republic, a federal republic formally established from the formal creation of a federal state in 1581 by several Dutch provinces—seceded from Spanish rule—until the Batavian Revolution of 1795. It was a predecessor state of the Netherlands and the first fully independent Dutch nation state.
The Netherlands and the Dutch are a mix of Hollanders (Höllander) from the West (North-Holland and South-Holland), Utrechters (people from Utrecht in the Middle, Utrechters are middle Dutch people, people from the center of the country), the Nordic Frisians (Friezen), the Eastern Dutch Low Saxon or Saxon peoples (Groningers, Drentenaren, Overijsselaren, Twente people -Tukkers-, Gelderlanders -Achterhoekers, Veluwenaren, Betuwenaren, Arnhemmers and Nijmegenaren en etc.-) and the Southern-Dutch Brabanders. So globaly the Dutch are a bunch of Hollanders, Frisians, Brabanders, Limburgers, Saxons and Utrecht people. A Western South-Hollander or North-Hollander with his 'Danish' or 'British' directness will always be a Hollander in the rest of the Netherlands and especially in the Dutch speaking Flanders part of Belgium. Their directness (extravert being) doesn't always works in the more closed, traditional and introvert Arnhem in the East. If you go even further farther East, Enschede or Hengelo in Overijssel (Twente region) at the German border are even more provincialist, Low Saxon, regionalist and localist.
So the Netherlands is plural, and that is logical, because we are a so called parlaimentarian monarchy, but the underlayers of that monarchy is republican, it goes back to the Dutch Republic, the Seven United Netherlands. For me thank god general Dutch is dominant and used everywhere. So most dialect and regional language speakers also speak or use general Dutch. Like Karl, I have sometimes difficulties with very heavy Southern Limburg, Brabant, Flemish and Zeelandic dialects. Often farmers dialects (village, hamlet, small town and region based), like the Hunsrück dialect low mountain range in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, which was spoken by actors and acrtresses in the excellent German Heimat series of Edgar Reitz.
In the early 1980s, the film director Edgar Reitz shot the first part of his trilogy Heimat in the Hunsrück, a large part of it in Woppenroth, a;so known as Schabbach. In 2012, Reitz returned to the Hunsrück for the shooting of his film Die andere Heimat - Chronik einer Sehnsucht in the village of Gehlweiler. The film focuses on the pre-March era in the mid-19th century and the waves of emigration from the Hunsrück to Brazil. As a Dutchman I recognise the localism and the regionalism of the heavy dialect speaking students who go from Schabbach in the Hunsrück to the large city of Munich in Bavaria to study music at the conservatory there.
Cheers, Pieter
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Post by pieter on Dec 22, 2019 6:24:30 GMT -7
My Gelderland has no 'National' or Eurregional identity, because people from Gelderland don't feel Gelders (Gelderlandish), because they have a historical, local, regional, family heritage, dialect, regional language connection to the region, city, town or village they are living in. Achterhoek in the East, the Riemers in the middle east, the Veluwe in Northern Gelderland, the Betuwe farm lands in Southern-Gelderland, and the Southern Gelderland people who live on the borders with Limburg and Brabant who already speak with the typical Southern North-Brabant or Limburg accent and regional language. I often mistake Southern-Gelderland people in Arnhem to be Brabanders or Limburgers, but they are Southern-Gelderland people who speak with the Soft G of the Limburgers and the Brabant people. I have the hard Holland (Northern) G in my Dutch.
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