[KaiserPro]

For those who aren't gifted with the dutch language (its easy to learn for enlgish speakers. Its like german but with english syntax. logical spelling and grammar thats really not that hard)

Anyway, Tegelwippen is where you "flip tiles" and replace them with plants. The basic play is that it reduces flooding, and regulates temperature. Plus its pretty.

https://interlace-hub.com/national-dutch-championship-%E2%80...

The thing that makes its dutch, is that they don't tend to use asphalt in holland for paving, its mostly tiles. This means that you don't need anything other than hand tooling to make a change.

[microtonal]

Its like german but with english syntax

I don't want to be too pedantic, but it's not. Dutch syntax is very similar to German, both are typically analyzed as an SOV (subject-object-verb) language with movement of the finite verb to the V2 position in declarative main clauses, unlike English.

Word order of Dutch and German clauses (+ some other Germanic languages) are typically described in terms of topological fields [1] and Dutch and German have very similar (albeit not the same) topological field constraints, leading to very similar word orders. Like German, Dutch has grammatical genders (three like German, though only two are distinguished in definite articles), similar verb conjugation, etc.

People are often led to believe that Dutch is more similar to English because it doesn't have overt case marking.

[1] Simplified, a clause is partitioned into a vorfeld, mittelfeld, and nachfeld by the so-called brackets, which are the V2 and verb cluster positions.

[jillesvangurp]

I'm Dutch, I live in Germany. The language and grammar are different enough that I struggle with German. Dutch dialects in the north of the country are very similar across the border.

There's also the notion that the Dutch grammar has been changed quite a bit over the years and used to resemble German a lot more. Mostly things are a lot simpler these days than they used to be. Older Dutch texts are hard to read even for Dutch people. Even texts from the 19th century look very different from modern Dutch.

Finally, the reason English speakers recognize a lot of Dutch words is because a lot of English words actually have Dutch origins. For example, the word cookie is a bastardized form of the Dutch koekje. Especially a lot of naval jargon comes straight from Dutch. The reason for this is long trade relations, colonizing the same places (e.g. New York used to be New Amsterdam), etc. There even was a Dutch king on the British throne in the seventeenth century.

[microtonal]

I'm Dutch, I live in Germany. The language and grammar are different enough that I struggle with German.

Well, it's another language... there is always going to be a learning curve, especially beyond a certain age. My wife is German and picked up Dutch pretty quickly. Vice versa, I lived in Germany for five years and even though I barely put in any effort (and we speak Dutch at home), I found German fairly easy to pick up.

There's also the notion that the Dutch grammar has been changed quite a bit over the years and used to resemble German a lot more.

That's certainly true for case marking (with which Dutch often struggle with when speaking German), but again in terms of word order, grammatical gender, etc. they are still very similar and certainly more similar than Engish and Dutch are.

---

English is much easier than German for most Dutch people for various reasons, including: more years of English education (starting during primary education, being mandatory up to VWO 6); subtitled movies; continuous exposure to English through media, internet, etc. The generation of my grandparents were often much better at German than English, they had a lot more exposure to German radio/television, travel was much less international, so they'd usually go to Germany, Belgium, or France when going abroad, etc.

[pixelpoet]

Half German half Afrikaans, Dutch is easy and it's horrifying how bad native English speakers are at just one language.

[servus45678981]

It is lol. Meanwhile we mainland Europeans have to grow up at least bilingual

[hetspookjee]

What book would you recommend to start to best understand the way you described the differences and similarities between the languages? It really is a very nice post and I’d like to thank you for it.

[microtonal]

A linguist could probably come up with a good reference for a comparative work. I mostly had to dig into some of this stuff when working on Dutch and German NLP, but I am by no means a linguist. For Dutch I found this book very helpful:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/syntax-of-dutch/FB5E136...

It also has comparisons to German spread throughout the book. (Full disclosure: former colleague of mine.)

If you can read Dutch, the E-ANS is also a very valuable resource:

https://e-ans.ivdnt.org/topics/pid/ans21lingtopic

E.g., description of topological fields:

https://e-ans.ivdnt.org/topics/pid/ans21010101lingtopic

https://e-ans.ivdnt.org/topics/pid/ans21010102lingtopic

[gillesjacobs]

The field of study is called linguistic typology.

During my linguistic studies, the course material was comprised of the Oxford and Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology (and a bunch of papers on specific linguistic features). But the Oxford handbook is a very good start.

It's a very cool field of study that will allow you to identify commonalities across languages and the differences between them. A good typologist should be able the be dropped in a completely unknown language context and learn the features from use (which was basically our exam).

[drivingmenuts]

I only speak English (and a few foreign fightin' words) and yet, I understood (I think) the meaning of "vorfeld, mittelfeld, and nachfeld" way easier than "the V2 and verb cluster positions".

Maybe I should just learn Dutch and dump English?

[snowpid]

Vorfeld, Mittelfeld and Nachfeld look more like German.

[microtonal]

Yes, these are German words. Much of the early topological field literature was by German linguists, so it's common to use the German words.

[pixelpoet]

Also see eigenvector etc.

[snowpid]

What realm of science are we? Linguistic or math?

[lucb1e]

Point stands though. Voorveld, middenveld, achterveld works in Dutch. Don't know what these German words technically mean and so they might have a different translation, but you can / it is common to make this type of compound.

[snowpid]

Achterveld works in some German dialects !

[lucb1e]

According to <https://www.dict.cc/?s=achter>, not only is it northern german, but also "sailor language"! :D English is similar, having "aft" for sailors to say "rear". I know boat people have specialized terms but never thought of it as sailor speak but rather like any other jargon. For some odd reason, the dictcc page also mentions the random fun fact that "achter" is Afrikaans, ignoring where Afrikaans got it from (or rather, who forced it upon them)

[tgv]

A nitpick, but Dutch nor German is an SOV language. That's a crazy notion that Chomskians had to invent by way of cognitive dissonance reduction.

But Dutch is very similar to German, indeed, and both are also similar to Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.

[johan_felisaz]

Coming from a quantum physics point of view, it is very strange to see the term "topological fields" in this context !

Do you have recommended references about these grammatical constructs ?

[davedx]

English speaker who moved to the Netherlands here.

My experience was it isn't particularly easier or harder than any other language to learn.

The grammar and word ordering is different enough that you really have to study and practice a lot how to structure sentences. Pronunciation of some sounds (like 'ui') can be pretty hard if you've never had to make those sounds before in your life.

But indeed the spelling is much more consistent than English, which definitely helps a ton with reading and writing.

I moved to the NL 14 years ago, took the Staatsexamen for naturalisation after Brexit, have had a couple of jobs where Dutch was the first language, but my Dutch still isn't perfect and I regularly make mistakes.

That being said, I am now finally at the stage where I can go on a day trip to Amsterdam and the locals don't speak English back to me when I speak Dutch. :)

[lucb1e]

> I am now finally at the stage where I can go on a day trip to Amsterdam and the locals don't speak English back to me when I speak Dutch.

Was in Amsterdam again yesterday for the first time in a couple years and was again surprised to notice how many people just default to English, or waiters who speak back to me in English after me ordering in (my native) Dutch. Finding people to speak Dutch back to you in Amsterdam is an impressive feat in itself! :D Either way, congrats on becoming accentless enough that people don't hear it anymore and jump on the opportunity to speak English!

[davedx]

Thank you, that's kind of you to say. It's been a journey! :)

[simsla]

> That being said, I am now finally at the stage where I can go on a day trip to Amsterdam and the locals don't speak English back to me when I speak Dutch. :)

That's seriously impressive. Dutch is my mother tongue and they still respond to me in English! (Although I speak a slightly different dialect, Flemish, from Belgium.)

[thfuran]

>My experience was it isn't particularly easier or harder than any other language to learn.

Then I suspect you've never tried to learn languages that are very different from English like Mandarin, Hungarian, or Tamil.

[davedx]

I've also tried Japanese, Swahili, Arabic and Hebrew. Languages with completely different writing systems obviously have a significant extra hurdle. And of course, it depends how well you want to learn it. Becoming fluent enough to get by when you travel somewhere for a holiday or business trip is one thing; becoming proficient enough to do job interviews and work full time professionally with that language is another kettle of fish. :)

[niemandhier]

The size of the Dutch vocabulary is insane!

The average Dutch person has a passive vocabulary of about 42k words, the average German speaker has only 20k passive vocabulary.

In German 1300 words make up about 85 % of a text, in Dutch you need 2000.

[croes]

According to Duden.de Germans have a passive vocabulary of ca. 50,000 words.

https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Zum-Umfang-...

Didn't find a source for dutch people.

[microtonal]

The Dutch counterpart of the Duden (Van Dale) says 42,000 words. My take is that they are probably going to be about the same, because the counting methodologies are probably going to be somewhat different (e.g. do you count well-known semantically transparent compounds as separate words or not).

https://www.nu.nl/wetenschap/4308088/gemiddelde-woordenschat...

[gillesjacobs]

Dat het verschil in gemiddelde passieve woordenschat tussen Duitse en Nederlandse moedertaalsprekers zo groot is, twijfel ik als linguïst toch wel een beetje aan.

Are you sure that there study/studies are sound and use directly comparable measures for passive vocabulary items?

[Ladsko]

Ja mich würde die Methodik da auch interessieren... I don't speak dutch but whenever I read it I understand a surprising amount. So I don't think there really are twice as many words as in German...

[cyberlimerence]

Very interesting. If you could elaborate, are there linguistical/historical reasons for that ? Does Dutch use more "fine-grained" concepts on average ?

[orlp]

I suspect compound words are a major component of it.

In English "car factory" are two words. In Dutch an "autofabriek" is one word.

A dictionary might choose to list the most common compound words which quickly adds up.

[johnisgood]

Same in Hungarian, they are usually written as a single word if the components together create a specific meaning or form a distinct conceptual unit, which is distinct from the individual meanings of the words.

For instance, "autógyár" (car factory) is a compound word made up of "autó" (car) and "gyár" (factory).

I suspect the reasoning is the same for Dutch.

[lucb1e]

Do you also have funny misplaced spaces?

Example in Dutch: you can say "losgeld" (literally: loosemoney, money that loosens/releases something; specifically: ransom) but you can also say "los geld" (loose money) which is like spare coins you have in your pocket or so.

In 2020, a supermarket requested that people don't pay with losgeld but by card instead, so they meant to say "please don't pay with cash" but they said "please don't pay with ransom"

[cyberlimerence]

In relation to English, sure. But above compares Dutch to German, and they are both Germanic languages, and I think utilize compound words heavily. Looking at sibling comments, maybe those numbers are exaggerated.

[lucb1e]

It's not like English doesn't have compound words. It's generally "patient data" and not "patients' data" because the words form a compound noun in the same way that "patientendaten" in German and "patientendata" in Dutch form a compound noun.

What's more, English also does togetherwriting. Are "web site" and "website" counted as two words when doing an English word count? Or are words like "web site" simply not included (only "web" and "site" separately)?

(Fun fact: website is webseite in German, where "seite" actually means "page" and not site at all, so you're really saying webpage which, in turn, happens to also exist with a nearly interchangeable meaning in english. I wonder how many circles of meaning there are like that! ChatGPT wasn't able to come up with any, at least not without prompt tweaking or follow-ups)

[cyberlimerence]

I see, you're right. I found this tidbit on Wikipedia (and the article itself)[1] quite interesting:

"As a member of the Germanic family of languages, English is unusual in that even simple compounds made since the 18th century tend to be written in separate parts. This would be an error in other Germanic languages such as [...] German, and Dutch. However, this is merely an orthographic convention."

And this also:

" In Dutch and the Scandinavian languages there is an unofficial trend toward splitting compound words, known in Norwegian as særskriving, in Swedish as särskrivning (literally "separate writing"), and in Dutch as Engelse ziekte (the "English disease"). Because the Dutch language and the Scandinavian languages rely heavily on the distinction between the compound word and the sequence of the separate words it consists of, this has serious implications. In Dutch, compounds written with spaces may also be confused, but can also be interpreted as a sequence of a noun and a genitive (which is unmarked in Dutch) in formal abbreviated writing. This may lead to, for example, commissie vergadering ("commission meeting") being read as "commission of the meeting" rather than "meeting of the commission" (normally spelled commissievergadering). "

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)

[Gys]

Source?

[ByThyGrace]

It looks like they're removing tiles from public pathways in some of those pictures. Is that legal in NL?

[Aeolun]

If your home does not have a garden in front (directly against the sidewalk), and you do not make it deeper than 60cm, and you can leave at least 1.2m of sidewalk from the edge of the removed/replaced tiles.

Still, pretty cool stuff.

[_delirium]

Googling suggests that the details differ by municipality. For example, Hilversum requires [1] you to submit a proposal for a facade garden. If approved, the municipality will take care of removing the appropriate width of sidewalk tiles and replacing them with soil. The owner is responsible for planting and maintaining the resulting garden. Other municipalities have different regulations.

[1] https://hilversum.nl/en/mijn-wijk/geveltuintje-aanleggen

[wffurr]

The translated rules page mentions municipal regulations that allow a “facade garden” on the front sidewalk.

[isoprophlex]

Plus "wippen" also means, roughly, "to shag", so it has this lulzy undertone

[skrebbel]

The whole site is full of this stuff. You can be “wipper van de maand” (shagger of the month), there’s “wiptips”, and

> Bij het NK Tegelwippen hebben we nogal wat affiniteit met de bloemetjes en de bijtjes (snap je ‘m?)

which loosely translates to “We at NK Tegelwippen are rather fond of the birds and the bees (get it?)”

For context, “wippen” means “to flip <something> over” and “to hop on a seesaw” but it’s also polite slang for having sex.

[Aeolun]

I think in this case the connotation is more with the seesaw version of wippen.

At least, I have a very hard time associating ‘tegel’ and the sexual version of ‘wippen’.

[amelius]

What does "NK" mean?

[consp]

Nederlands Kampioenschap or Dutch national Championship

[bartkappenburg]

Dutch Championship (Nederlands Kampioenschap)

[barrenko]

Easier to learn than German?

[lucb1e]

I (Dutch) found English much much easier to learn than German. Controlling for the amount of benefit I saw and exposure I got to English, probably it's more like "a little easier" but, still, I expect the inverse (English to Dutch) is similar. There's no way that it's harder to learn the language with 2 genders and 2 corresponding words for "the" ("de" and "het") than the language with 16 words for "the" (and the German gender+case stuff also carries over into all adjectives and other word classes, which Dutch mostly doesn't do (the words for "this" and "that" are the only exceptions I can think of)). I'm also pretty sure Dutch has more loan(ed out) words or cognate words.

If you want to go even easier, Afrikaans is like Dutch but with even more English influences and even fewer grammar rules afaik, e.g. no verb conjugations: where in Dutch you say "ik ga, hij gaat, wij gaan" (I go, he goes, we go), in Afrikaans that's something like "ek gaan, hy gaan, wy gaan".

I don't think knowing Afrikaans reasonably would allow you to also reasonably read Dutch though, if that were the goal (let alone German, which is practically unintelligible to someone who speaks perfect Dutch and English if they didn't also have any amount of German training)

[barrenko]

I knew German well enough some decade ago.. so it's nice to know if I had to learn it, I'do ok (I may have to)