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Jijks!
That would sound something like "yikes!" in Dutch, and it's what I said to myself when I read this piece about the Dutch influence on place names in New York City. There's a flurry of Dutchiness going on here right now, in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's arrival in these parts. (No, he wasn't Dutch, but he was sailing for the Dutch East India Company poking around the waters that would later bear his name in the hopes of finding the fabled Northeast Passage.) The point of the article is to help English speakers pronounce place names like Harlem, Brooklyn, Flushing, Gansevoort, and Coney Island the way they would have been pronounced in their original Dutch forms. (Or, rather, how these places would sound in modern Dutch. 400 years is a long time on a language.) I said "yikes," because the writers were, admittedly, a bit daunted and had a hard time rendering the pronunciation or making sense of Dutch spelling. We can always send them a copy of our Dutch course. I'm not criticizing; I'm commiserating. It all reminded me of how hard it is to write phonetic transliterations of words from other languages, and this crops up in our jobs around here often enough. Unless you're using the IPA, which most people don't know, you're in for a good challenge. We prefer to avoid it altogether, but sometimes, for example in a script-only quick reference for travelers, you just need to do it. Take Breukelen, which of course became Brooklyn. They represented the Dutch pronunciation as "Bro-ke-len" and mentioned a "puckered lilt." The first vowel is rounded, so "puckered" is right. But there's just no good way to write that vowel in an English-based phonetic transliteration that's going to make sense. I would have gone with something like "BROOH-kuh-luh," which may or may not be more confusing. (I like to capitalize the stressed syllables.) The first vowel is close to the vowel in look, with (indeed) puckered lips. Maybe the h makes it clearer that it's not the oo in pool, but there's no guarantee. The two e's are reduced to schwas, as in sofa, and the -n is dropped, at least typically in spoken Modern Dutch. I do think they could have done better with Vlissingen (Flushing), which they broke down as "Ve-le-is-sing-nen." They wondered about the f sound, and it's true that the Dutch v sounds a lot like an f to an English speaker. But it's not exactly an f. Still, I would have gone with one, because it's closer and just plain easier on the English speaker: FLIH-sing-uh. There was a funny bit about Bowery/Bouwerij, and its missing, or perhaps deliberately hidden, j. J in Dutch can be a simple consonant, pronounced as in yes. But then there's the combination ij, which just looks crazy to an English speaker, and is pronounced something like the vowel in bike or like. But definitely not exactly. It's a diphthong that starts somewhere in the neighborhood of e as in get or a as in had, and then winds up near ee as in see or i as in him. You can imagine how difficult it is to come up with a phonetic transliteration for that. You really have to explain it, or better yet, hear it and imitate it. Obviously, if you're really going to learn a language, you need more than a phonetic transliteration. Even the IPA isn't going to do the trick, no matter how familiar you are with all of its strange symbols. For a fun exercise in trying to imitate how the Dutch pronounce, or pronounced, Gansevoort, a little ad-hoc transliteration system can be helpful, but it's still a hard nut to crack.
Tags: Dutch
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