A break in the Netherlands

[lefthandedspanner]

They get a Norwegian to help them. Apparently Norwegian and Geordie are sufficiently similar that if they speak slowly to each other, they can understand each other. Since both are Viking languages, this is not as daft as it sounds at first. (Any Geordies or Noggies like to comment - this is purely hearsay on my part).

A lot of northern English and Scots dialect is primarily descended from older forms of English, with some Nordic influence - and Geordie is possibly the nearest living relative of old English.

I always believed that the Frisian language was the closest living language to English - see this "family tree".

The written language is. Thanks to the accent though, the spoken language is borderline incomprehensible to most Dutch, Danish and English speakers.

[brombeer]

Everyday (West-)Frisian speech is so full of words or phrases borrowed from Dutch that many Dutchmen will cope despite accent and grammar. Not dissimilar to the story about English and French earlier.

[Vierwielen]

A lot of northern English and Scots dialect is primarily descended from older forms of English, with some Nordic influence - and Geordie is possibly the nearest living relative of old English.

I always believed that the Frisian language was the closest living language to English - see this "family tree".

The written language is. Thanks to the accent though, the spoken language is borderline incomprehensible to most Dutch, Danish and English speakers.

One of the things that caught my eye when looking at written Fries was the use of the word "it" for the indefinite article. I saw an immediate correspondence to the Yorkshire phrase "I am going down 't mill".

[Debaser]

On a different note:

7) Bikes. They were everywhere, and almost all were the heavy-framed sit-up-and-beg type known as Oma-fietsen, or "Granny bikes". They were often fitted with baskets and/or child seats fore or aft, sometimes with a windshield as well. There were almost no Lycra warriors to be seen, though I did see a couple on an inter-urban route. The Dutch appear to prefer to keep athletic cycling off the public roads.

How very true, and how rarely acknowledged! The Dutch (and Belgians), in my experience, use cycles sensibly as a means of urban transport. They cycle at a reasonable speed, sitting upright so they are at the eye-level of pedestrians. Yes, as a pedestrian you have to be wary, but I have never found them a problem. Perhaps Cambridge is the nearest you might get in the UK to the Dutch approach?

I don't think this is a difference of attitude, merely of volume. I suspect that the 'lycra warriors' make up a similar percentage of all users as they do in the UK, say around 1%. The difference being, in the Netherlands, bike riders can account for up to around 10% of all travel modes, meaning that 1% of sports cyclists gets subsumed in a massively larger bike riding population who are going about their business in 'normal' clothes. However, in UK cities (other than Cambridge), we get about 1% to 2% cycling, so that when you see a cyclist over here there's at least a 50:50 chance they'll be top to toe in Team Sky kit, probably much greater.

If we ever do see a UK city at 10% modal share for bikes I can guarantee they won't look like a peloton straight off Le Tour, probably more like something from the Tweed Run. Wouldn't that be a civilised city?

[Fenlander]

However, in UK cities (other than Cambridge), we get about 1% to 2% cycling, so that when you see a cyclist over here there's at least a 50:50 chance they'll be top to toe in Team Sky kit, probably much greater.

The vast majority of the cyclists I see going past my house are commuters heading out of town to the to the min wage jobs in the food production warehouses that dominate the local employment sector. They are mostly wearing hi viz jackets or vests (as they have to to enter their work site) are on a 'well used' looking bike, not showing any lights and will almost certainly be on the path rather than the 30mph limit road. They don't stop for traffic lights, nor the side roads and only use the road to pass each other. If you're driving you only have to deal with them if you're turning on/off the main road and crossing their line.

On a weekend I might see some lycra louts but they are always on the road and single file as they zoom out of town towards the main roads. They will be going twice as fast as the commuter riders. They do stop at the lights as a group but spread out to single line as they set off, the road is wide so there's plenty of room to pass them and the speed they're going doesn't really hold you up anyway. Expensive shiny bikes, even shinier helmets and the full race team replica outfit on.

[Debaser]

They are mostly wearing hi viz jackets or vests (as they have to to enter their work site) are on a 'well used' looking bike, not showing any lights and will almost certainly be on the path rather than the 30mph limit road. They don't stop for traffic lights, nor the side roads and only use the road to pass each other. If you're driving you only have to deal with them if you're turning on/off the main road and crossing their line.

Sound like the sort of riders who would benefit from oma/opa-fiets being more available in the UK, with their integral dynamo lighting and built like tanks for comfortable, but not Strava record-breaking, journeys. Oh, and proper bike infrastructure!

[FleetlinePhil]

However, in UK cities (other than Cambridge), we get about 1% to 2% cycling, so that when you see a cyclist over here there's at least a 50:50 chance they'll be top to toe in Team Sky kit, probably much greater.

In the Calder Valley, I would put that figure higher than 50:50 overall. There are certainly a few commuters who use their cycles to and from the railway stations, and no doubt some who do cycle to work locally, but leisure cyclists vastly outweigh their numbers, albeit at a different time of the day or week. The A646 between Todmorden and Hebden Bridge on a summer Sunday could be a total nightmare, and this is not a road where you can safely overtake a string of ten cyclists.

The point I was trying to get over in my original post was that, in the Netherlands, a bike is a means to an end. Here, for many people, it seems to be an end in itself, regardless of the delay it may cause other road users who are simply trying to get from A to B for a reason.

[B1018 A120 M11]

Regarding the Dutch pronunciation of 'ui'... I'm a bit late to the party on this, but bear with me...

I'm a fluent German speaker, so I can often read Dutch, but can't understand it when it's spoken, and am not good at guessing pronunciations. I wondered how 'ui' was pronounced in Dutch on my trips through the Netherlands for years as well (all I knew was that it's NOTHING like how a German would pronounce it, which would be a simple 'oo-ee' sound)! However, I eventually came to a slightly different conclusion... that it was *sort of* like 'ou' in English, but with a residual bit of an 'eye' sound to it as well. The best way of summing up my conclusion was that it sounded a bit like the noise the Spitting Image puppets of Prince Charles or the Duke of Edinburgh used to make in the middle of the word 'house', which, rendered in text, is a bit more like 'hyce' or possibly more elongated, with a bit more of a 'yuh' sound in there too, so more like 'high-yuh-ce'. I think some Northern Irish accents pronounce 'ou' like that too (thinking back to news footage of Orangemen talking about 'Sye-th Belfast')...?

I based this on what I heard an automated voice saying on the Amsterdam Metro/tram as I approached Amsterdam South station ('South', of course, is 'Zuid' in Dutch). But those recorded voices can be odd and come out strangely in my experience, so I'm still not 100 percent sure this is right, or how a Dutchman would pronounce 'ui' in everyday speech*. For the record, what I remember hearing on the tram for 'Zuid' sounded to my British ears a bit like a clichéd West Countryman (you know the kind of deal: 'oo, ar, I loves me moi zoiderrr etc etc') saying 'zoyd'.

* Then of course, there is the fact that different Dutchmen might pronounce this dipthong in very different ways. Dipthongs seem particularly prone to sounding different in regional accents, at least in the languages I know well (English, French, Italian, German). The perfect illustration of that is the 'ou' sound in Belfast I mentioned earlier: the second you hear one of those, it's a 'marker' for a very specific regional accent of English. So maybe 'ui' is like that in different parts of the Netherlands...

Are there any *proper* Dutch speakers here who can put us out of our misery?

EDIT: I see vierwielen has already explained this. Yes, that description ('a' as in 'age' but with your mouth set for 'oi') fits with what I remember hearing...

[lefthandedspanner]

I always believed that the Frisian language was the closest living language to English - see this "family tree".

The written language is. Thanks to the accent though, the spoken language is borderline incomprehensible to most Dutch, Danish and English speakers.

One of the things that caught my eye when looking at written Fries was the use of the word "it" for the indefinite article. I saw an immediate correspondence to the Yorkshire phrase "I am going down 't mill".

That comes from a contraction: "to the" -> "to t'", which is agglomerated into one syllable, pronounced "tut" and written as "'t".

In Yorkshire at least, the contraction of "the" written as "t'" is appended onto the previous word and not pronounced separately.