West Flemish Proverbs: Djoos Utendoale

My father is West Flemish. I grew up in Limburg at the opposite side of Flanders and it is as if this geographical distance also reflects in the difference within our spoken dialects. Generally speaking, all non-West Flemish Flemings will act like the Western dialect is completely incomprehensible. For myself, I mostly joke that I was raised bilingually. But no, also for me it requires a big effort to understand the different West Flemish dialects (...and don't even start about asking me for the correct pronunciation...).

Still, both on top of my father's desk and in the living room of my grand parents is a collection of beautifully calligraphed proverbs. Not in regular Dutch or what I would describe as "standardized Flemish", no: real West Flemish proverbs and aphorisms written in pronunciation spelling.

As I understand most of the meaning, it is difficult to translate them without losing some of its poetic value. Still, underneath I present some of the proverbs written by father Joris Declercq, also known as Djoos Utendoale. I was quite shocked to notice that there is no Wikipedia-page dedicated to him, so I will use part of this article to tell about him as well.

Norwegian verbs, verb på norsk (bokmål)

As I am currently visiting the University for Life Sciences or the Universitetet for miljø- og biovitenskap  (UMB) in Ås, Norway, I have been trying to raise my level of the local language: Bokmål.

There is the 'official course', organised by the local government, but there are also many attempts by the university or private, to bring an additional platform. Through such a 'student organised weekly class', I got in contact with Tania who has been giving some extra classes in the evenings.

Her way of teaching taught me a new concept in language learning: "Focus on the verbs first, the rest come automatically". The idea behind this is that in any sentence, the verb is the core of that sentence and it is therefore much more worthwhile to concentrate on ten basic verbs (and their correct conjugations) first as the needed nouns and other vocabulary will come by having conversations.

This got us thinking on which are the verbs that we use the most in a language? Definitely 'to be' (*), 'to have', 'to go', 'to give', 'to take', 'to see', 'to want', ...

Following is a table of the verbs that I am concentrating on at the moment:

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Ronald Reagan R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

Netscape/Mozilla.org co-founder and now dance club proprietor Jamie Zawinski has found this obscure tag during his visit at SXSW: 

original post, origin unknown

It is a parody on the H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos, where ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn translates to "in his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming".

It also reminded me of the hilarious emailservice 'reagan.com' where for $39.95 a year, you can get your own @Reagan.com-email address and help Michael Reagan "end the left-wing's dominance of email service providers".

This week I learned...

LEARN from Rick Mereki.

New things I have learned during my first days in Norway, in chronological order (I kid you not):

May Silliness

Cuckoo! (from USA Manufacturer)

Nothing interesting to post today, so let's give in to useless silliness!

Just some lovely quotes, some stupid remarks and some silly links. Welcome to the geeky side of myself, which I anxiously try to hide during professional presentations, job interviews or family visits on Sundays:

In other news... (April)

Taken from Bruce

From time to time I bump into news items that I would like to comment on without elaborating at length, making it plainly not worthy of its own post. So I will just list them up, here are the items that caught my attention during the past week:

Fin, c'etait vachement bien

Pris de FLE

Et finalement, la fin de ma semaine francophone. Je n'ai pas eu beaucoup des réactions, mais pour moi-même c'était interessant de me (re-)entrainer. J'ai appris qu'en français celui-ci s'appelle "une contribution" de "mon blogue".

Vocabulaire de l'informatique

Picture taken from WA Today

Bien sûr qu'à l'école j'ai étudié des listes de vocabulaire. Les premières années c'était toujours avec des histoires de Bob et Bobbete, ça je n'oublierai jamais de ma vie:

Bob est un garçon.
Bobette est une fille.
Lambique est un homme.
Tante Sidonie est une femme.
Fanfreluche est une poupée.

Ce n'est qu'au moment où j'ai commencé à travailler à Bruxelles que j'ai eu besoin du vocabulaire de l'informatique. Je connaissais seulement les mots "ordinateur" et "souris" mais peu à peu, je me suis amélioré.

Ici vous trouverez une liste des mots français qu'on utilise dans le monde des ordinateurs:

Wim goes French

Picture by Cyril Plapied

French...


To be honest, I just can't remember the last time I have ever written something in French. Maybe an occasional email or a small text message, but really involve myself in the language? That must have been since my days in secondary school, over a decade now.

Dutch: gender of nouns

Illustration taken
from SLRevolution

Although I have only been a Livemocha-user shortly (*), I have noticed that Dutch learners have troubles with defining the gender of nouns in Dutch. This is quite a hurdle in the road of mastering the Dutch language and even native speakers make mistakes regarding this one, but the solution is simple: use a dictionary. I recommend to use Van Dale (also for Linux users) or the Wiktionary.

Now, why is this so important?

Latest project: learn Kanji

Application for employment (2)

We got a new aplication letter yesterday, titled:

APPLICATION FOR RECEPTIONIST OR WATER

I would be very grateful if you could kindly offer me employment as stated above.

Okay sweety, we are in need of waiters, but any time we need some water, we will surely contact you. Thank you for applying with us!

--
To read more about our recruitment policy, have a glance at a previous blog entry: Application for employment .

Verdomhoek(je) of verdomdhoek?

The VRT does it again... But before I start complaining about the spelling mistake in Dutch, first the political message itself:

I am thrilled about the recent news of the possibility to end the conflict in Sudan. If a seperation might be the end of all this suffering, then so be it, let's hope for the best. After a civil war that lasted more than two decennia, the area was a total disaster. Still, it hardly reached the headlines in mainstream media anymore. There was no more "news", what could they do? Report again that there was a lot of suffering? Report again that many people were dieing of disease and that swift action was needed? It is (was) one of these dramas that happened behind the scenes.

De duimriem of de buikschroeven?

As a discussion about the Dutch language seems unreasonable in English, I will switch to my mother tongue.

Vandaag las ik het volgende als hoofdpunt voor Buitenlad bij de VRT-nieuwssite: VS draait het leger de duimschroeven aan:

Over 5 jaar moeten er 47.000 militairen minder zijn. De plannen voor een amfibievoertuig worden ook afgevoerd om de besparingen te halen.

Die kop klopt gewoon niet, het spreekwoord "duimschroeven aandraaien" betekent dat iemand in een situatie wordt gebracht waarin hij weinig anders meer kan dan gehoorzamen (source: Wikipedia). Akkoord, het Amerikaanse leger zal deze besparing niet kunnen weigeren, maar het spreekwoord "de buikriem aanhalen" lijkt mij meer gepast.

Ik ben benieuwd wat de heer Ruud Hendrickx hiervan vindt.


Meer taalfrustraties:

• Verdomhoek(je) of verdomdhoek?
• de toestand van de Nederlandse taal (Koen Van de moortel)
• taalfouten die mij irriteren (Koen Van de moortel)

Saru mo ki kara ochiru

猿も木から落ちる: "even monkeys fall from trees" : anyone can make a mistake

• part 1 
• part 2

Don't assume...

... it makes an ass out of u and me.

image taken from Pamreader