It has always struck me as a bit strange that English and Dutch are linguistically very close (both derived, I believe, from Old Low German), yet for most native English speakers Dutch seems to be very difficult to pronounce.
Robert Rothman
Sounds like a severe condition – something akin to scurvy, perhaps.
English is definitely suffering from a massive loss of Low German phonetical structure.
I guess it’s not too uncommon that even closely related languages (I’m thinking of Swedish and Danish in particular) are pronounced very differently; my knowledge of Swedish makes written Danish quite readily understandable, but reading it aloud feels totally beyond me.
I was at the presentation of a paper last week where, after some less exciting stuff about the role of background noise of speech perception for second language learners, the presenter showed us some results from a study where subjects ranked tokens out of context from unknown languages by their similarity to English. Even native Korean speakers said that Dutch was a lot like English, and not knowing that it was Dutch!
The other interesting (or else just coincidental?) thing was, people ranked Hebrew and Japanese at different distances from English depending on their native language, but for some reason they more or less consistently ranked those two language close to each other. Do people universally perceive Hebrew and Japanese as similar, or are the two languages perhaps just equally dissimilar from English on some continuum? More research is required, and someone should probably give me a grant.
Among other things, Afrikaans has lost the genders and many verb inflections. An example:
Here Afrikaans has dropped the distinction between “ons” (“us”) and “wij” (“we”), and the distinction between “zal” (“will”, singular*) and “zullen” (“will”, plural). For a Dutch speaker, a lot of Afrikaans sounds the way the following would sound to an English speaker: “Us is go.”
- Perhaps not the greatest example, because “zullen” is one of only five verbs in Dutch where the 1st person singular is identical to the 3rd person singular, and where the 2nd person singular has two correct forms. But anyway.