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Dutch & German - Just How Similar? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Derian Triglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5309 days ago 227 posts - 464 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Czech, French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 9 of 37 03 June 2010 at 1:58am | IP Logged | |||||
To give you a rough example: John killed Bill. [John is the murderer] Bill killed John. [Bill is the murderer] In Polish: John zabił Billa. In this sentence John is the subject [did the action of killing], and Bill is the object [was acted upon - was killed]. In the English sentence, the order of the words determined which of them played which role. Here, in Polish, the object of the sentence is indicated by inflecting the word 'Bill', by adding an '-a' suffix to its root, and so marking it as the object of the sentence. Having this information embedded in the word, you will recognize the subject and the object of the sentence regardless of the word order. Thus: John zabił Billa. Billa zabił John. John Billa zabił. Billa John zabił. All of the above mean the same and are grammatically correct - John is the killer and Bill is the victim. -------------------------- In German: ein hund - a dog But when you want to say "I have seen a dog.", then again, the word '(a) dog' will be the object of the sentence, and therefore it'll have to be inflected: Ich habe einen hund gesehen. What is specific about German is that the articles are inflected as well. And this time, it was only the article that has been inflected. Obviously, many other grammatical functions are expressed by case inflection. And OlafP will certainly be willing to tell you more :) Edited by Derian on 03 June 2010 at 2:06am 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5436 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 10 of 37 03 June 2010 at 1:59am | IP Logged | |||||
Cases are forms of nouns or pronouns that indicate their role in a statement. Consider this sentence: I sent her a letter. There are three parts that would be subject to declension in a language with a case system. "I" is the acting person or the subject of the sentence. The subject always takes the first case (nominative). As far as nouns are concerned, this is the case you find in dictionaries. "a letter" is an object, something that the subject acts upon. "her" is an object as well, because the subject does something towards it. You see that there are some remains of cases left in English, because the personal pronoun "she" changed to "her". The difference between "her" and "a letter" is that the subject must first act upon the letter, therefore it is called direct object. Direct objects take the fourth case (accusative). Only after the letter was written it can be sent to "her", so "her" is the indirect object. Indirect objects take the third case (dative). The second case (genitive) is used to indicate possessions. In English you would do this with "'s" for nouns. Besides that, Russian uses the genitive for negations. Now that I'm at it I may also mention that Russian has a fifth case (instrumental), which indicates what the subject uses to perform the action. So in "I wrote her a letter with a fountain pen" you would put "fountain pen" into the instrumental case in order to express "with a fountain pen". This case is also used to express professions, for instance in "I work as an engineer" you would express "as an engineer" by the instrumental form of "engineer". The sixth case in Russian (prepositional) is used only with particular prepositions (hence its name) to express locations or things that someone talks about. That was only a rough sketch. There are a few more things to it, and sometimes it gets a bit confusing. Some verbs require an indirect object but no direct one, some require a direct object and the indirect one is optional, ... Edited by OlafP on 03 June 2010 at 2:09am 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 11 of 37 03 June 2010 at 9:39am | IP Logged | |||||
BTW, the Low German dialect (Plattdeutsch) is somewhat similar in pronunciation to Dutch. In fact, many Low German speakers claim that they have hardly any problems figuring out the meaning of Dutch cognates. My familiarity with Low German definitely helped me when I studied Dutch. For more information on the Low German dialect, see the following Wiki table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattdeutsch#Sound_change 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Vos Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5567 days ago 766 posts - 1020 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Polish | Message 12 of 37 04 June 2010 at 2:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you very much for that Derian and Olafp, makes much more sense to me now. Looks like my future
endeavours into Polish and German are going to throw some very interesting features at me. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 13 of 37 09 June 2010 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Written language, fairly similar. Spoken, not so much.
Some of the Dutch dialects in the east of the Netherlands can be considered forms of Low German. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5766 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 14 of 37 12 June 2010 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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By the way, if Dutch is Low Franconian, can the High Franconian West Germanic dialects be considered "High Dutch"?
Je rigoleけど... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| michi Nonaglot Newbie Austria Joined 5302 days ago 33 posts - 57 votes Speaks: Dutch*, German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese Studies: Turkish, Arabic (Written), Serbo-Croatian, Indonesian, Japanese | Message 15 of 37 15 June 2010 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Dutch is my mother tongue, but I have been living in Austria for over 20 years and for this reason my German is more or less that of a native speaker. It is true that Dutch and German are quite similar, but that the German grammar is more complicated.
It has already been mentioned that German has four cases, whereas in Dutch case inflections exist only with regard to pronouns - just like English "he - him" = "hij - hem". German has three genders and Dutch only two. Moreover German verbs have subjunctive forms, which have all but disappeared from the Dutch language. Although with regard to the written language Dutch and German speakers can understand the other language quite well, I don't think this is the case with the spoken language. However most Dutch people have learned at least some German in school. So if you want to understand German I am afraid it will be useful but not sufficient to have learned Dutch. Historically there is not a real language border between Dutch and German, so it might not be correct to speak of "Dutch" and "German" dialects. Traditionally the German dialects are divided into a five main groups: Franconian, Saxonian, Bavarian, Swabian and Thuringian. The Franconian and Saxonian in the North that have not made the consonant shift - "appel" (apple) changed into "apfel" - are called Low Franconian and Low Saxonian. The dialects spoken in the present-day Netherlands were partly Low Franconian and partly Low Saxonian. However quite early a seperate Dutch language has developed, based on the dialect in Flanders. The earliest examples date from 12th century Brugues. High German on the other hand has grown out of High Saxonian like it was spoken in 14th century Prague and spread through Martin Luther's bible translation. So the concept of Dutch and German as two seperate official languages does have a long history. Although it is arguable to say that Dutch dialects are "German" dialect, High German never was the official language in the Netherlands. It is difficult to say when exactly the Dutch started to consider themselves seperate from the Germans. Untill 1648 the present-day Netherlands were officially part of the German empire. Also the word "Dutch" is quite ambigious. Probably is was not meant to distiguish the "Dutch" from the "Germans", but had a similar meaning as "deutsch" (German): language of the people in contrast to Latin. The Dutch word for German is "duits" and Pennsylvania Dutch spoken by some religious groups in Pennsylvania is a German and not a Dutch dialect. The first line of the Dutch national anthem is "Wilhelmus van Nassouwe ben ik van duitschen bloet", in English: "William of Nassau am I of German blood." It was centainly not meant to present the national hero William the Silent as a foreigner! Edited by michi on 16 June 2010 at 10:14am 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6230 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 16 of 37 15 June 2010 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As a side note, how similar are Dutch and Afrikaans? Mutually intelliglible or not??
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