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English = Dutch
A Dossier of Compelling Evidence
History has left many a Dutch mark on the English language. There is a sizeable English vocabulary of Dutch origin, such as beer (bier), frolic (vrolijk), mate (maat) and pancake (pannekoek); and borrowing from Dutch is an ongoing process, as witness recent additions like apartheid, coffeeshop, lekker and gabber music. But while these words are in frequent everyday use, their origin is largely unknown and forgotten today. ‘We are not conscious that the words “brandy”, “cruller”, “golf”, “duck” (light canvas), “isinglass”, “measles”, “selvage”, “wagon”, “uproar” are from the Dutch.’ (Baugh & Cable 1978, p. 9). It may therefore be of interest to consider in some more detail the historical background and development of this Dutch element in English.
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Cultural and linguistic contacts across the North Sea
The Dutch loan words above reflect many centuries of cultural interaction and language contact across the North Sea. From the Norman Conquest onwards this traffic has brought many things and words from the Low Countries to the British isles - in trade and commerce, fishing and whaling, maritime and colonial rivalry, warfare and navigation, but also in water management, brewing and mining, agriculture and gardening, the textile industry, crafts, industries, art, science, printing and literature.
In 1066 William the Conqueror brought with him considerable numbers of Flemish troops and craftsmen. In the early twelfth century Flemish colonists who were ‘highly skilled in the wool trade’ settled in many different areas, from the southern coast of Wales to the Scottish borders and East Anglia. Often the only trace they have left is a place name, such as Flemingston in Wales or Flemington near Glasgow. Elsewhere it may be a street name like The Strand in Central London, which reminds us that once upon a time - and really not so very long ago: it was still in use in 1952 - Londoners did have a beach (Dutch strand) along the north bank of the river Thames.
These settlers and colonists from the Low Countries brought new industry
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A map from Cornelis Vermuyden's Discourse Touching the Drayning of the Great Fennes (London, 1642). Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, dc.
and technology. The draining of the Fens in East Anglia, first by Flemish monks and later by Dutch engineers, brought with it words like sluice (sluis), canal (kanaal) and morass (moeras). In agriculture we find Dutch words like hack (hak), yoke (juk), buckwheat (boekweit) and butter (boter). Words like clock (klok), drill (drillen) and besom (bezem) were introduced by Dutch and Flemish craftsmen - clockmakers, glaziers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, joiners, coopers, pouchmakers, potters, surgeons and scriveners. And with the production and consumption of alcohol came words like brewery (brouwerij), hop (hop), geneva (jenever) which was later shortened to gin, booze (buizen) and drunkard (dronkaard).
In the seventeenth century the economic dominance of Amsterdam brought new financial institutions such as the Bank of England, and the so-called ‘Dutch tax’ of 1644 on meat, victuals, salt, starch, textile goods and other commodities. Here too we find words like check (strictly American) or cheque, mint (munt), lottery (loterij), bluff (bluffen) and swindle (zwendel), and words for money like guilder (gulden), doit (duit), stiver (stuiver), dollar (daalder) and, in American English, dime. The last word goes back to 1585, when the Flemish mathematician Simon Stevin, in his pioneering pamphlet The Tenth (De Thiende), proposed to introduce the decimal system in society, for ‘Money-masters, Marchants, and Landmeaters’. His French translation, La Disme, came out in the same year; and in 1608 Robert Norton's English translation, Disme: the Art of Tenths; or, Decimall
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Arithmetike, was published in London. But Stevin's revolutionary proposal had to wait almost two hundred years before it was eventually adopted in the United States (in Great Britain it took another two centuries before the penny - or rather the shilling - finally dropped).
In 1648 the first substantial Dutch-English dictionary was published in Rotterdam, A Copious English and Netherduytch Dictionarie, compiled by the soldier, translator and scholar Henry Hexham. Through him and other English mercenaries in the Eighty Years War the English language acquired Dutch military words such as booty (buit), beleaguer (belegeren), quarter-master (kwartiermeester), knapsack (knapzak), plunder (plunderen), tattoo (taptoe) and blunderbuss (donderbus).
In naval and maritime terminology we find large numbers of Dutch loan words - for things related to ships such as bowsprit (boegspriet), deck (dek), keel (kiel), ballast (ballast), freight (vracht), and wagoner (a book of charts for nautical use); for the vessels themselves like sloop (sloep), schooner (schoener) and hooker (the common, not the happy variety); and for sailors' jobs like gybe (gijpen), dock (dok), smuggle (smokkelen), splice (splitsen), steer (sturen) and aloof (aan loef). At sea the Dutch language provided words for buoy (boei), ebb (eb), lee (lij), maelstrom (maalstroom), reef (rif) and wrack (wrak); and names for all kinds of sea creatures from whiting (wijting) to walrus (walrus). Ranks on board were known by their Dutch names as skipper (schipper) and boatsman (bootsman); and both freebooter and filibuster (via Spanish) derive from Dutch vrijbuiter. In all the harbours along the North Sea sailors used a common lingo, and this helps to explain how vulgar slang and taboo words from Dutch entered into English, such as fucking (fokkinge), cunt (conte), crap (krappe) and shite (schijten). Today it would seem the loan is being repaid with interest, as English shit! is now the most common and popular exclamation in Dutch.
The Dutch maritime expansion led to settlement in all continents - in South Africa, the Americas and Australasia - where the Dutch often lived and worked in close contact with English speakers. In the United States, at the time of independence, Dutch narrowly failed to be adopted as the national language; the Roosevelt dynasty was of Dutch descent; and New York in particular had a strong Dutch character. Dutch remained in use there till the early part of the twentieth century, and has left many traces - place names such as Harlem (Haarlem), Wall Street (Walstraat) and Coney Island (Konijne eiland); common words like boss (baas), cookie (koekie), burgher (burger), coleslaw (koolsla), snoop (snoepen), spook (spook) and poppycock (pappekak); the nickname Yankee (from Janke, Jantje); and the myth of Santa Claus (from Sinterklaas, i.e. St Nicholas, the maritime patron saint of the Dutch) and his sleigh (slee). In South African English too, there are many Dutch loan words such as aardvark, springbok and wildebeest, boer, bush, trek, veld and outspan (uitspannen).
In the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) Dutch acted as an intermediary for the adoption into English of words from Malay and other Oriental languages, like amuck (amok), cockatoo (kaketoe), orang-outang (orangoetan) and tea (from Dutch thee < Malay teh <Amoy Chinese t'e). The famous Hobson-Jobson dictionary of Anglo-Indian usage contains many examples of the linguistic adaptation processes that are at work here, involving the English speakers' talent for word play, pidginisation, mispronunciation
Title page of Henry Hexham's A Copious English and Netherduytch Dictionarie (Rotterdam, 1648). Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert i, Brussels.
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A wagoner: Title page of Lucas Jansz Waghenaer's The Mariners Mirrour (1588). Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, dc.
and folk etymology. Thus, decoy miraculously derives from Dutch eendekooi, and scorbut from Dutch scheurbuik (scurvy).
In the field of art, painting and drawing many Dutch words were borrowed: easel (ezel), sketch (schets) and maulstick (maalstok), to name but three. Around 1800, if one wanted a masterpiece, one simply went and bought a vandyke. The case of landscape (landschap) is interesting in that its suffix -scape has become productive in modern English, witness words like seascape, cloudscape and - as C.S. Lewis has it - the ‘great skyscapes of East Anglia’. Today this is followed by further new formations like art-scape, soundscape, cityscape and even mindscape.
In literature and the sciences we find a similar Dutch influence. If William Shakespeare was not actually a Fleming, it is not impossible that he visited the Low Countries as a soldier or an actor. Milton certainly knew Dutch and may have benefitted from Vondel's tragedy Lucifer (1654) when writing his
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Pieter de Hooch, Children in a Doorway with ‘Kolf’ Sticks. c.1658-1660. Panel, 63.5 × 45.7 cm. The National Trust, Polesden Lacey.
Paradise Lost (1667). Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift - they all knew and used Dutch models, and Gulliver spoke Dutch well enough to pass for a Dutchman. But then, he had been a student at the University of Leyden (now Leiden), where so many other English and Scottish students went in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to study medicine, law or theology. These students, and publishers like Elsevier, were instrumental in the exchange of ideas and knowledge and the dissemination in the British isles of disciplines like anatomy, botany and plant names such as tulip (tulp), daffodil and nettle (netel). Later on, however, much of this was forgotten, due to the intense linguistic rivalry that developed between the Dutch and the English in the late eighteenth century, and the ensuing dominance of English. This rivalry generated many strongly negative stereotypes and pejorative expressions such as Dutch cap (contraceptive diaphragm), Dutch courage (geneva), Dutch gold (cheap copper leaf), Dutch uncle (boring old
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pedant) and Dutch wife (guling, or sleeping pillow). A key element in this rivalry was the depiction of Dutch as Double Dutch (gibberish), or even, as James Boswell put it, ‘a language fit only for horses’.
Last but not least there is the domain of sport and games. Cricket goes back to a Flemish phrase, ‘met de krik ketsen’, literally ‘to chase with a curved stick’. This was shortened to krikets, which finally became cricket, as John Eddowes relates in his The Language of Cricket (1997). The noble game of golf, first recorded in Scotland in 1457, was known in the Low Countries in 1360 as kolf - a game in which the players had to get a small, hard ball into a hole in the turf or lawn with as few strokes of their club as possible. In winter the game was played on ice, as one can see in the Golden Age paintings of Hendrick Avercamp. And today, in the age of football, we have the case of Brooklyn - the name David Beckham and his wife gave their first-born son, after the New York borough where he was conceived. But would the Beckhams know that this name goes back to the Dutch village of Breukelen - which also figures in the last name of one of Holland's most renowned goalkeepers, Jan van Breukelen?
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A common ancestor: Ingvaeonic
The presence of so many words of Dutch origin in the English language reflects a shared past, a common North Sea culture, and a remarkable openness on the part of English speakers to new words adopted from abroad. However, much the same could be said for the presence of words from French, Latin and other, more exotic languages in English. That is, the history of contact and borrowing, though interesting and important, can tell us only so much, and it is only when we move beyond it that we discover a far more intimate connection between Dutch and English than between, say, English and French. For although the number of French and Latin loan words in English is quite substantial, they do not occur in the inner core of its grammatical system, amongst its pronouns, articles and demonstratives, its prepositions and conjunctions, in its inflections and its syntax. And it is precisely here that Dutch and English share a wide range of common elements.
There are many nouns that point to a deeper relationship between English and Dutch than we have seen so far. We find cognate words in the domain of family / kinship - daughter (dochter), wife (wijf) and nephew (neef); names for body parts - lip (lip), tongue (tong), elbow (elleboog), thigh (dij), knee (knie), shin (scheen) and ankle (enkel); for domestic animals - cat (kat), hen (hen), sheep (schaap), cow (koe), swallow (zwaluw) and bee (bij); plants and trees - beech (beuk), oak (eik), birch (berk) and willow (wilg); the seasons and the weather - summer (zomer), winter (winter), day (dag), night (nacht), snow (sneeuw), rain (regen), wind (wind) and sunshine (zonneschijn).
We find similar close correspondences in other parts of the grammatical system. The two languages have in common not just weak verbs like babble (babbelen), bake (bakken), hope (hopen) and knead (kneden), but in particular also many strong verbs which are much older, such as think-thought-thought (denken-dacht-gedacht), see-saw-seen (zien-zag-gezien) and swim- | |
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swam-swum (zwemmen-zwom-gezwommen). And there are common adverbs and adjectives such as blue (blauw), naked (naakt), handy (handig), thick (dik), long (lang), gruff (grof), full (vol), cool (koel), tight (dicht), enough (genoeg), sickly (ziekelijk), manly (mannelijk) and openly (openlijk).
Beyond this, the two languages have many other kinds of words in common. Common pronouns are you (jou), me (mij), mine (mijn), him (hem), it (het) and himself (hemzelf); common articles and demonstratives are the (de), an (een), this (deze), that (dat), here (hier) and there (daar); common numerals are three (drie), seven (zeven), eleven (elf), twenty (twintig) and hundred (honderd). Common prepositions are in (in), over (over), for (voor), under (onder), to (te/toe/tot) and around (rond); common conjunctions are since (sinds), when (wanneer), than (dan), as (als) and while (terwijl); common question words are where (waar) and what (wat); and common interjections are ahoy, now (nou), well (wel), yea (ja) and Ach (ach).
And then there are remarkable correspondences between the sounds, syntax and grammatical inflections of the two languages. We find regular sound change in the following pairs, where English ou corresponds to the vowel ui that is so typical of Dutch: out (uit), clout (kluit), snout (snuit), spout (spuit), sprout (spruit), grout (gruit), loud (luid), south (zuid), mouth (muide), house (huis), louse (luis), mouse (muis), owl (uil), howl (huilen), foul (vuil), rough (ruig), thousand (duizend), brown (bruin), crown (kruin), down (duin) and town (tuin). In inflection there are common affixes such as be- in be-devil (beduvelen) and -er in baker, but also the common plural ending -s for nouns (baker-s, bakker-s), the endings -er and -est in comparatives and superlatives (great-er / great-est, groter / grootst), and the -ly / -lijk endings we saw in the adverbs. In syntax, finally, we note that Dutch and English have very similar ways of stringing their words together in sentences. Shakespeare's English employs many Dutch constructions - a form of address like ‘Min alderlefest sovereign’ (Mijn allerliefste soeverein), a greeting formula such as ‘How now?’ (Hoe nu?), and questions like ‘What think you, sailors?’ (Wat denken jullie, zeelui?) and ‘How is it with
you?’ (Hoe is het met jou?). Similar evidence is available from seventeenth-century polyglot conversation books intended for merchants travelling through Europe, where we find striking similarities between spoken English and Dutch sentences like ‘Have you good wine?’ (Hebt u goede wijn?), ‘Hath your horse droncke?’ (Heeft uw paard gedronken?) and ‘How fare you?’ (Hoe vaart ge?). And today this is no different: an English sentence like ‘Come here now, Peter, will yer, 't is so cool here in the boat’ is almost literally the same as its Dutch equivalent ‘Kom hier nou, Pieter, wil je, 't is zo koel hier in de boot’.
All these many different correspondences point to a connection between the two languages that goes far deeper than could be explained just by a history of contact and borrowing. So, instead, we must explore an alternative explanation, viz. that the two languages have a common origin and share a common ancestor. It is generally assumed today that this common ancestor language was the so-called Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic, which around ad 100-500 comprised the dialects of the Frisians, the Angles, the Jutes and the Saxons. Clear traces of this can be found on both sides of the North Sea - in place names such as Norwich (Noordwijk), Bentham
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A Dutch ABC
The Dutch you know already - English words of Dutch origin, with dates of first recorded usage
| A |
anchor (1692) |
< anker (1240) |
| B |
brandy (1622) |
< brandewyn (1300-1350) |
| C |
clock (1664) |
< klok (1237) |
| D |
dike (chaucer) |
< dijk (1035) |
| E |
etch (1634) |
< etsen (1573) |
| F |
furlough (1625) |
< verlof (1361) |
| G |
geneva (1706) |
< jenever (1606) |
| H |
hop (1440) |
< hoppe (1376-1400) |
| I |
iceberg (1774) |
< ijsberg (Middle Dutch) |
| K |
keelhaul (1666) |
< kielhalen (1590) |
| L |
landscape (1598) |
< landschap (1240) |
| M |
monkey (1530) |
< ?manneke (1498) |
| N |
nip (1430) |
< nijpen (1360) |
| O |
overall (1596) |
< overal (1240) |
| P |
pickle-herring (1570) |
< pekelharing (1500-1525) |
| Q |
quacksalver (1579) |
< kwakzalver (1390-1460) |
| R |
rack (1305) |
< rek (1287) |
| S |
skate (1648) |
< schaats (1567) |
| T |
tide (1435) |
< getijde (1236) |
| U |
uproar (16th c) |
< oproer (1537) |
| V |
vane (1581) |
< vaan (1170) |
| W |
waffle (1808) |
< wafel (1450) |
| Y |
yacht (1557) |
< jacht (1528) |
| Z |
zebra (1600) |
< zebra (1596) |
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Double Dutch
In 1994-1995 Dutch brewers Oranjeboom launched their beer on the London market with an eyecatching campaign of Double Dutch (It helps if you read it out loud in English).
| 1. | Stuf de tur kei ei mof voor'aan Oranjeboom |
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| 2. | Take uur tast buds voor aar rij de |
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| 3. | U vil nijver hier aan ie tin negatief a bout de tast of Oranjeboom |
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| 4. | Zeems lik dubbel Dutje? Wel, zuur prijs, zuur prijs, et ijs |
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(Benthem), Plymouth (Pleimuiden), Amersham (Amersfoort) and ‘Nes’ in Skegness (and Dutch Eemnes); and in shared words like five (vijf), island (eiland), ladder (ladder), mare (merrie), bull (bul), wheel (wiel) and little (luttel).
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The original language is Dutch
The Ingvaeonic hypothesis is in line with what the printer William Caxton observed, back in the fifteenth century, viz. that Old English was much ‘more like to Dutch than to English’ - something that is certainly true of Chaucer's work. Since then, however, it is English that has changed the most, for... ‘if that linguistic cataclysm, the Norman Conquest of 1066, had not occurred, the English today might speak a language not unlike modern Dutch’ (McCrum et al. 1986, p. 58). It is therefore reasonable to suppose, not that the two languages share a common ancestor, but rather, quite simply, that Dutch is the older. The Dutch have known this for centuries. As the Antwerp humanist Joannes Goropius Becanus demonstrated in his Origines Antverpianae (1569), Dutch was actually the language spoken in Paradise. His argument was that, as a rule, older words are shorter, and since Dutch has more short words than either English, French, Latin, Greek or Hebrew, it clearly must be older. His younger contemporary, the mathematician Simon Stevin, added from a slightly different perspective that, of all the languages in the world, Dutch was best-suited to expressing ideas, because of its many mono-syllabic base words and the ease with which it can produce new word-combinations to express new ideas.
These insights are alive and well in the Netherlands today - for example in the recent claim of the Duizenddichter poet of Amsterdam, that all languages derive from Dutch - although this is still a bit contentious with the Frisians, who make the same claim for their own language in the epic Oera Linda Bok (1872). The Duizenddichter starts from the fact that Adam (< Dutch adem, breath) was the first human being to receive a Dutch name. He also reminds us of the fact that the Dutch are the only people in the world who give each other letters as presents each year on the fifth of December, when they celebrate St Nicholas' birthday. And he supports his theory with many striking examples of etymological derivation. Thus, English teacher obviously comes from ‘Diets-heer’ (= master of Dutch), erudite from ‘eeruw-Diets’ (= honour your Dutch), and alphabet derives not from Greek ‘alpha-beta’ but from Dutch ‘al-van-bute’-leren (= learning everything by heart).
Recently the Dutch linguist Hugo Brandt Corstius has taken this tradition into the twenty-first century by portraying Dutch as the natural world language of the future. In a flashback from the year 2099 he recalls the Nobelprize winning invention by two Dutch scientists working in the field of advanced language technology, who discovered the so-called ‘DNA of inanimate objects’, which assigns each and every object in the world its natural, generic name in a universal letter code. Take, for example, S-T-O-E-L. Though this happens to be Dutch for chair, what really matters is that this is now the one and only true name of this object, and therefore, inevitably, all
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resistance from other languages such as English and Spanish has proved futile.
And so, as we now see, Dutch truly is the once and future language. Take any of the basics - money, booze, sex, sports, the weather - and the Dutch have a word for it. This in turn helps to explain why all the other languages in the world - including English - are so easy for the Dutch and for those who know Dutch. So my modest proposal would be for the English to take Dutch as their first foreign language, and to follow the traditional Dutch recipe for successful language learning. The key is to start early, taking a language that is a close cognate, hence not too difficult. This will produce early success, which then breeds further success, and lays the foundation for learning other languages. So, the first foreign language to be learned by the English in school should not be the traditional bourgeois French, nor solid German, nor even popular Spanish, but simply Dutch, the mother of all mongrel languages (and also, it seems, an effective antidote to dyslexia). If the English were to follow this advice, who knows, one day they may become just as proficient in languages as the Dutch.
reinier salverda
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Bibliography
| barnouw, a.j., Monthly Letters on the Culture and History of the Netherlands. Assen, 1969. |
| baugh, albert c. and thomas cable, A History of the English Language. London, 1978. |
| bense, j.f., A Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary. The Hague, 1926. |
| brandt corstius, hugo, ‘2000-2099; Neew Neelans’. In: Peter Burger & Jaap de Jong (red.), Taalboek van de eeuw. The Hague / Antwerp, 1999. pp. 227-231. |
| eddowes, john, The Language of Cricket. Manchester, 1997. |
| haley, k.h.d., The British & The Dutch. Political and Cultural Relations through the Ages. London, 1988. |
| llewellyn, e.c., The Influence of the Low Dutch on the English Vocabulary. Oxford / London, 1936. |
| mcarthur, tom, The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford, 1996. |
| mccrum, robert, william cran and robert macneil, The Story of English. London, 1986. |
| osselton, n.e., The Dumb Linguists. A Study of the Earliest English and Dutch Dictionaries. Leiden / Oxford, 1973. |
| rizza, riccardo (ed.), Colloquia, et Dictionariolum Octo Linguarum. Viareggio / Lucca, 1996. |
| toorians, lauran, ‘Flemish in Wales.’ In: Glanville Price (ed.), Languages in Britain and Ireland. Oxford, 2000. pp. 184-186. |
| van der sijs, nicoline, Geleend en uitgeleend: Nederlandse woorden in andere talen en culturen. Amsterdam, 1998. |
| van der sijs, nicoline, Chronologisch woordenboek. De ouderdom en herkomst van onze woorden en betekenissen. Amsterdam / Antwerpen, 2001. |
| wrenn, c.l., The English Language. London, 1966. |
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| www.ucl.ac.uk/dutch: Study pack History of the Dutch Language |
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