Download Assignment 6 and 7 6.1 Individual Research Twenglish For Ling 3

Assignment 6 and 7
6.1 Individual Research
Twenglish
For Ling 3 we had to choose a subject to present. This subject must have something to do with
language awareness, the subject of this course. We chose the subject Twenglish because we both live
in Twente and it was not discussed in class until now. We already knew something because Elles
family is a proper Tweants family and they could help us with some Tweants knowledge. In this
paper, we will first explain something about Dunglish because it looks a lot like Twenglish but these
two cannot be confused. After Dunglish, there is something about Tweants. We cannot understand
Twenglish if we do not know where it originated from. And finally, Twenglish will be discussed.
Dunglish
Dunglish is a popular term for mistakes native Dutch speakers make when trying to speak English.
The poorest form of Dunglish, Steenkolenengels ("Coal English"), goes back to the early twentieth
century when Dutch port workers used a form of the English language to try to communicate with
the workers of English coal ships. Now the term Steenkolen English, also known as Dunglish is used
for people who can’t speak English very well.
Both of the languages have roots in the Germanic language. A lot of words sound and look similar. A
Dutch person who is not that good in English might think that because to kiss and kussen sound and
look a lot alike and have the same meaning, this also works for manner and manier.
The biggest mistake some Dutch speakers make is to translate the words/sentences literally. We will
give you an example: Heb je honger? A Dutch speaker will say ‘have you hunger’, which is incorrect.
In correct English it would be ‘are you hungry’ or ‘what mean you’ instead of ‘what do you mean’.
This is because English and Dutch do not follow exactly the same word order. English has a subject–
verb–object word order, an example would be ‘he plays cricket’. Dutch also has a subject verb object
shared with a verb second order. A verb second order is a specific restriction on the placement of the
finite verb (persoonsvorm) within a clause or sentence but has a subject object verb order. E.g. ‘ik las
gisteren dit boek’ or in English ‘I read yesterday this book’. Verb second word order is common
across the Germanic languages.
The Dutch also place perfect participles towards the ends of a clause. In the English language only
certain compound nouns can be written as one word, but with the Dutch language you write
compound nouns as a single word. Errors occur mainly in pronunciation, word order, and the
meaning of words.
Examples Dunglish
- Do not walk the grass
- Toilet outside use
- An accident sits in a little corner
- Make that the cat wise
- I want to decorate you
Tweants:
What is Tweants? It is a variety of Dutch Low Saxon group of dialects, descending from Old Saxon. It
is spoken daily by people of Twente, Tweants does not have a standardized pronunciation or spelling;
all towns and villages in Twente have their own local accents, which, although they are mutually
intelligible and similar, makes it hard to be tagged as a single dialect. Due to this fragmentation, and
the lack of a standard variety, many speakers of Tweants mostly do not refer to their language as
"Tweants" or "Dutch Low Saxon". They rather call it by the locality their variety is from, like Almeloos.
Tweants follows a number of low Saxon rules in verb inflection.
In Tweants plural forms receive the same inflection as the second person singular. Just like many
other Germanic languages, Tweants distinguishes between strong and weak verbs. In Tweants,
strong verbs receive an umlaut in present tense, third person singular and all persons in the past
tense. With the weak verbs, the third person singular is formed like the second person singular in
present tense. The past tense is formed by adding a –te to the verb stem. Tweants has three word
genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Tweants is recognized by the Dutch governments as a
regional language.
Origin of Tweants:
It is not known when Tweants became a language, but in the 1990’s the concept of Dutch Low Saxon
was only used by linguistic scientist. Speakers who would speak Tweants in that time would refer
their dialect to the place they came from like Almelo or they would say that they are talking plat. It is
not Dutch nor it is German, but the funny thing is, if you ask Dutch people they will say that Tweants
comes from German and the German people will say that Tweants comes from Dutch.
Dutch Low Saxon is spoken in a large region covering multiple countries. In the picture below, you
can see where is exactly is spoken. In theory, you could speak Tweants in Berlin and they still would
understand you. In real life, they do understand the largest part of what you are saying, but the
people in Berlin have some differences in there dialect. Theirs would look a lot more like German
and sounds more like that as well in comparison to Tweants.
Tweants proverbs translated into English
Als je lui bent kun je niets aan doen, maar als je moe Ai lui bint doa kun ie niks an doon, maar ai meu
bent is het je eigen schuld
bint is't oe eig'n schuld
If you are lazy, it is not your fault, but if you are tired it is your fault.
gaan we vrijen
goaj met brommers kieken
Do you want to watch mopeds with me?
Het is niet erg om dom te zijn, het wordt pas erg als je Dom wean heendert nich ' t wördt pas slim a-j
het zelf niet in de gaten hebt
' t zölf nich deur hebt
It is not a shame if you are stupid, but it will be if you don’t know that you are stupid
Twenglish:
Twenglish is a combination of Tweants and English. Twenglish looks like Dunglish, but it uses more
Tweants words and Twenglish has a different word order. Below we will show some really common
mistakes and we will explain them.
The door loose doen
This sentence is incorrect in Dutch because of loose doen. In tweants you will say ‘de deur los doen’
whereas in Dutch the right way would be ‘de deur open doen’. Speakers of Tweants would loosely
translate ‘los doen’ to loose doen’.
- The milk is broken
The difference between Dutch and Tweants is the word ‘broken’. When speaking proper English, you
would say expired, or as the Dutch would say ‘over de datum’. While speaking Tweants, when
something is expired you would say: ‘het is kapot’, which would be translated to broken.
- My hands pick
When something is sticky, the Dutch would use the word ‘plakken’. in Tweants ‘plakken’ replaced by
‘pikken’. So if a speaker of Tweants would want to say ‘My hands are sticky’ he instead uses ‘to pick’
because it looks a lot like ‘pikken’. This would result in the sentence ‘My hands pick’.