Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Bill Sloman Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design Subject: Re: Dutch-like language [OT] Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2024 12:23:31 +1100 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 58 Message-ID: References: <1r3zqks.1pae81f187shiuN%liz@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid> <1r4209s.17i61oih6bhr5N%liz@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2024 02:23:38 +0100 (CET) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="0e1be78c7a1dd462e2ae15dbd5dbbae0"; logging-data="1274160"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/qFi/5R4FE+mJ+HYCriIQKMLIm9aPLalU=" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird Cancel-Lock: sha1:l26d1fGvAnVqAmD/IWjwyN6uBh0= X-Antivirus: Norton (VPS 241204-6, 5/12/2024), Outbound message X-Antivirus-Status: Clean Content-Language: en-US In-Reply-To: <1r4209s.17i61oih6bhr5N%liz@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid> Bytes: 3499 On 5/12/2024 5:24 am, Liz Tuddenham wrote: > Bill Sloman wrote: > >> On 3/12/2024 11:59 pm, Liz Tuddenham wrote: >>> Last night in the 80-metre band I heard two 'hams' talking. The vowel >>> sounds of their voices seemed to be characteristically Dutch (an accent >>> like the Groningen area) but the language was completely >>> incomprehensible. I listened for several minutes but didn't hear a >>> single word I recognised >>> >>> Do any of our Dutch contributors know of some dialect that is Dutch in >>> sound but does not use the standard Dutch language? >>> >>> [I tried to send this to Jan by e-mail but the address I found for him >>> on the Web just bounced.] >> >> As Jan said, it could have been Fries. To German's Dutch sounds like yet >> another low German dialect. >> >> The historical reality is that Dutch was the dominant German dialect in >> northern Europe during the Dutch golden age, and high German is the >> Prussian dialect spoken at the court of Frederick the Great - he >> preferred to use French - which got enforced as the official court >> language in the countries Prussian came to rule. The other low German >> dialects still persist as local dialects. > > There are some distinctive sounds in modern Dutch which can identify it > to a non-Dutch speaker, particularly the accent in the NE provinces. > They were present in this QSO but the words didn't sound like any Dutch > I have ever heard (or German, or French or any other European language). You need a phonetician. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology The international phonetic alphabet lists about 200 distinct phonemes and human languages all use different subsets of them, lumping some together and treating them as if they were identical. There are phonological contour maps of the Netherlands which show which provinces tend to make particular choices. Looking for "distinctive sounds" is over-simplifying task. As legg has pointed out there is a South African variant of Dutch, spoken by the Boers. It's called Afrikaans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaans I'm not familiar with it, but my psycholinguist wife had had some exposure to it. -- Bill Sloman, Sydney