The Death of Imagination

Het groot ligt door den waeren Brabander

A colleague brought me two French Revolution political pamphlets with this title today because I'm the go-to guy here for Dutch and Afrikaans. She was at a loss because she'd tried running this through GoogleTranslate and ended up with "it is by the great wares Brabander". Actually, the title on one of the pieces is slightly different, ligt being spelled licht (coinciding with the modern standard spelling; the pronunciation would be the same in either case). Machine translation being what it is, the programme spits out a completely different translation of it, namely "the beam through the wares Brabander".

Partly this is Google's usual problem with archaic spelling (normalising waeren to waren gets you the proper translation, "true") but I'm still not sure why "great light" should be equated to "beam". I'm just sorry she couldn't remember how she mistyped it on a previous attempt to get "something about a big Dutchman".

I figured my previous entry would prompt another alloglossic dream episode, and sure enough it did. In DUTCH.

I was visiting an Imbissstube (or, as I suppose the Dutch would say, "snackbar") with a full-colour picture menu above the window. In-between the uniform golden brown of various schnitzels and other fried meat products, there was some sort of sandwich with an invitingly green herb sauce. The run-on description used the term "speren", so I went up to the window and asked the pleasant Dutch couple who ran the place, "Wat is de 'spere'?" (Yes, I know it's not a real word; I'm fanatically about looking up such things as soon as I wake up. At the time, though, I congratulated myself on guessing the gender correctly.) As hard as I tried to speak Dutch to them, their replies were all in English. "The spere is a beverage," the woman told me. I tried to explain about the picture I'd seen, but it'd disappeared; all the pictures and descriptions on the menu were different. My dreamworld: A place where satisfaction is always deferred.

Woorden in het korte verhaal "Spookstad" van Hafid Bouazza die in het Van Dale woordenboek niet te vinden zijn:

• kovel
• kevelkin
• nebbespitsorig
• bolbuikig
• holgerugd
• buideltje
• lendenen
• grien
• lodder
• pampoesje
• ruiseln
• helledampen
• pluimgesnater
• vleugelgewiek
• wildgewingerd
• betrippeln
• kuf
• schaargewijs
• wanlust

I was sitting in the park yesterday doing my Chinese when my freaky downstairs neighbour (hereafter to be known as "Rosie's Dad") came by.
"Is that Chinese?"
"Yep."
"You can write Chinese?"
"Badly."
"How many languages do you speak?"
"Depends who I'm talking to."
Sounds like I'm being flip and vague again, but that statement was directly motivated by the events of the previous afternoon.

I spent last week boning up on Dutch since kayiwa said there'd be Dutch speakers present. I remember thinking to myself, What kind of Dutch speaker doesn't know English? The answer is, obviously enough, a seven year-old.

Good-natured complaints from the hostess that everyone was gathering in the kitchen and no one was on their fabulous porch encouraged me to play pioneer. Soon I was joined by the nederlandstalige niece and her Arizonan cousin and we began kicking around a soccer ball from our seats. To keep it low-key, I made a no-hands rule which the little girl seized on. I heard her shouting out numbers from time to time, but it took forever for me to realise that she was counting instances of "hands" (pronounced--as with other soccer terms--the English way; this also threw me) with the intent of imposing a penalty at 30.

In fact, her mother had to point this out when she joined us. That's also when the interrogation began. The girl asked me a question I couldn't follow at all. "She wants to know if you have a girlfriend," her mother kindly explained. "Oh, meisje!" I said. Then came the other questions--How old was I? What was my surname? And so forth. She shushed her mother's attempts to translate those, making it clear that this was not merely small talk but a test--and I flunked. She finally commenced behaviour universally recognisable as juvenile mocking. "She says 'You say you speak Dutch and all you know is the words for 'yes' and 'no'."

Guilty as charged. My Dutch is entirely incidental; I learned a few phrases when I visited the country, but mostly I skate by on the resemblance to German. Give me half a minute and I can form a reasonably correct simple sentence and take a stab at pronouncing it. (I warmed up for Saturday by participating in some online chat about literature in Dutch.) But listening comprehension is my worst skill in any language. Plus, kids are the hardest to understand. Often enough, I can't tell what they're trying to say to me in English. In an attempt to save some face, I kept relating to the others present my tale of a conversation with a German youngster near the end of my stay in Germany. My German was basically fluent at that point--I was even occasionally fooling native speakers--but I'll be damned if I understood anything he was trying to tell me.

The kids soon gave up on us and gave kayiwa's SIL and me opportunity for a good long chat. We discovered a common love of Catalan (and a common failure to read La plaça del Diamant to the end), but I didn't try to speak more than a few words of that. Sounding like an idiot in one language is enough for one day. (When niemandsrose pointed out that fear would've kept her from being so bold in a language she didn't really know, I pointed out that the free flow of beer was key.)