AMD 6: Ryen Krusinga

Ich habe Wikipedia besucht und Sprachen recherchiert. Warum? Die Familie meines Vaters sind aus Niederlande gekommen. Sie haben Niederländisch gesprochen. Meine Urgroßeltern haben manchmal Niederländisch um Haus gesprochen, und ich denke, dass meine Großeltern Niederländisch auch konnten, aber mein Vater kann nicht Niederländisch. Er kann nur ein bisschen Phrasen sagen. Niederländisch ist sehr ähnlich wie Deutsch (und auch Englisch). Es ist eine Brücke zwischen die zwei Sprachen. Es ist nicht so kompliziert wie Deutsch, aber mehr als Englisch.

As the third generation descendent of a Dutch family, none of the language has reached me. It wouldn't have crossed my mind to research Dutch had it not been for my hospital visit last Thursday (3/29/12). I was having minor surgery for my Kidney stone problems. In the pre-op area, they put an IV in me, and although that wouldn't have knocked me out, I don't remember anything between then and slowly waking up from the anesthesia afterwards. As I was waking up, my anesthesiologist made conversation. He recognized my last name, Krusinga, as a common Dutch last name (although it's usually spelled "Kruisinga"). I could tell that he was from the Netherlands because of his accent (which to me was indistinguishable from a German accent, although from context I deduced that he was Dutch). After I was more fully awake, we had an interesting conversation about languages and last names. One particular factoid he mentioned was that more than a century ago, people in the Netherlands were not required to have last names. But then the governing powers changed or something, and people were required to give themselves last names. This resulted in people inventing ridiculous last names, meaning things like "bornnaked", many of which exist to this day. I don't think "Krusinga" is such a last name. He said that it could mean "Cross" or "Crossing".

Anyway, I read about the history of Dutch and German. According to wikipedia,

"Dutch is closely related to German and English^{[n 5]} and is said to be between them.^{[n 6]} Apart from not having undergone the High German consonant shift, Dutch—like English—has mostly abandoned the grammatical case system, is relatively unaffected by the Germanic umlaut, and has levelled much of its morphology."

I would say that the verb structure of Dutch is more similar to German than to English - verbs are often sent to the end of the sentence. It also sounds more similar to German, with many guttural syllables, and historically was closely related, even indistinguishable, from dialects of low German. But it has more Latin cognates than German, and less grammatical case differences. The definite article, "de", does not, with one exception, change form for any of the different cases or genders (which still do exist in the language).

Here is what Dutch looks like alongside the equivalent German sentence, according to Google translate:

Ich habe nie es gesehen. --- Ik heb nog nooit gezien.

Ich wünsche, dass du nicht so dumm sein würde. --- Ik zou willen dat je zou niet zo dom.

It's a rather funny-looking language.