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The Norwegian of Romance Languages? | ||
Tags: Romance Languages | Norwegian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4697 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 41 of 41 09 September 2014 at 10:54pm | IP Logged |
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English has been widely taught for a long time. But before that, sailors on merchant
ships of Dutch origin (usually ships that sold coal) used a Dutch/English pidgin to communicate with the English. This pidgin was termed "steenkolenengels" in Dutch (lit. charcoal English). It has become a byword for someone who has a poor command of the English language nowadays, actually - if someone speaks steenkolenengels they're probably mangling the language. It is even extended to speaking broken variants of other languages. The truth is though that the Dutch and English (and mostly also the Americans) have had relationships of commercial and diplomatic nature for a long time. There will always have been a significant subset of the population that spoke English or some other lingua franca of the time which was used to communicate. But if the criterion is mutual intelligibility, then no, that did not exist in those days. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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