Lesson Transcript

Welcome to Fun and Easy Dutch by DutchPod101.com
Today's question: How similar are Dutch and German really?
Hallo, mijn naam is Ernst.
"Hello, my name is Ernst."
In this lesson, I will compare the Dutch language with the German language.
But first, if you want to learn and speak Dutch in the fastest, easiest and most fun way, then get your free lifetime account at DutchPod101.com, right now. Start speaking Dutch in minutes with our audio and video lessons by real teachers. In the very first minute of the lesson, you'll learn a basic conversation.
Okay, back to the lesson.
I will introduce a bit of the historical development of Dutch and German. Then, I'll give some background information on how the pronunciation of the languages grew apart. After that, I will go deeper into specific differences between Dutch and German.
The first specific difference I will be discussing is the spelling in cases.
The second specific difference I will be discussing is related to grammar .
Before we jump in, a small disclaimer; I am fluent in German, but while learning German, I didn't quite get rid of my Dutch accent. So German audience, I'm sorry for butchering the pronunciation. Let's jump in.
In ye good old times, around the time of the Roman Empire, the Proto-Germanic language was spread out north of the Roman Empire. Because when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Which, in this case, meant speaking Latin instead of the “barbaric” Proto-Germanic. North of the Roman border, so in Austria, Germany The Netherlands, Denmark, and in parts of Scandinavia, Proto-Germanic was the most important language. To the west, the Slavic and Uralic language here was situated. This is Finland, Poland, Hungary, down to the Balkans and east towards Russia. Now you know where the Proto-Germanic language here was located.
So let's fast forward right to around the fall of the West Roman Empire. Around the fall of Rome, is when the High German consonant shift slowly started to happen. This means that over the course of many generations, the language changed. It took roughly 300-400 years. However, the High German consonant shift did not happen in Low German and Dutch.
Low German? Where did that come from? Let me explain.
Because of the standardization of German, Low German slowly became a dialect after the High German consonant shift took place. The High German became the standard German. Low German is still spoken in the northern part of Germany, but the amount of speakers is dwindling.
Just to clarify something about High German to avoid confusion.
High German is called High German because it was spoken in the German Alps up high. In German, it's called Hochdeutsch which is also translated as “standard German.” This may lead to some confusion, so make sure you have the right Hochdeutsch in mind when reading something on this subject.
Low German is called Low German because it was spoken in the lowlands of Germany. To avoid confusion, in Germany, they sometimes say Old High German to clarify which German they're talking about.
All right, the consonant shift takes place in four phases. Another three shifts happened which officially aren't categorized. Let's walk through them.
The first phase saw three changes.
The first one being that words ending with a /p/ sound changed to a /ff/ sound. Let's look at the word “ape” as an example.
In Dutch it's, “aap” and in German, it's “Affe.”
The second change was that the final “t” at the end of a word became a /s/ or /z/ sound.
To illustrate this, let's look at the word “white.”
In Dutch, it's “wit” and in German, it’s “Weiss.”
The third change is when the letter K was replaced with a /ch/ sound.
Take for example the word “belly.”
In Dutch, it’s “buik” and in German, “Bauch.”
The second phase saw two changes.
The first one being where the /p/ sound became /pf/ sound.
The word “horse” illustrates this point perfectly.
In Dutch, it's “paard” and in German, it's ‘Pferd.”
The second change was with the letter /t/ when it's not at the end of a word. It became a /z/ or /ts/ sound.
For example, the word “tooth.”
In Dutch, it's “tand,” and in German, it’s “Zahn.”
In the Southern Austro-Bavarian dialects, a third shift happened, but this one is not found in standard German, so that's a topic for another time.
The third phase saw only one shift that affected standard German.
The /d/ sound at the beginning of a word became a /t/ sound.
Look at the word “part.”
In Dutch, it's “deel,” and in German, it’s “Teil.”
Two other shifts happened, but they were restricted to Swiss German and some Austro-Bavarian dialects.
Let's keep moving. Whether the fourth phase is officially part of the High German consonant shift, is a debate, as one part also affected Low German and Dutch. This is the opposite of the first three phases which solely affected High German.
The three shifts include the /th/ becomes a /d/.
This shift also happens in Dutch and northern English.
So “bath” in Dutch is “bad,” and in German, it’s “Bad.”
The last three shifts happened somewhere, sometime along or after the High German consonant shift. The first one is like the other shifts mentioned before. The other two only concerned the pronunciation of letters.
The first one is that the /f/ or /v/ sound becomes a /b/ sound.
This can be seen in the word “love.”
In Dutch, it’s “liefde,” and in German, it’s “Liebe.”
The second shift, purely in pronunciation, is the G sound.
In High German, they used to pronounce the G as in Dutch.
The signature /ggg/ sound as in Dutch was unaffected by this change. We still pronounce the words in the good old way.
Take for example the verb “to give.”
In Dutch, we say “geven,” and in German, it’s “geben.”
The last one is that the /s/ and the /z/ are pronounced as /sch/.
Take for example the word “weak.”
In Dutch, it’s “zwak,” and in German, it’s “schwach.”
The last one does get a bit vague, as in Dutch, we also know /sch/ sound.
Take for example the word “shield.”
In Dutch, it’s “schild,” and in German, it’s “Schild.”
As I mentioned before, these changes started right from around the fall of the West Roman Empire and continued until somewhere in the 9th century, as then German was written down in books. This caused a degree of standardization of Old High German which later became the standard German. And that wraps up the phases.
Having this shift in mind, you can see why German and Dutch are over 80% similar. Don't think that every word is similar though. There are a lot of false friends.
The word “winkel” is such a false friend. If I say in Dutch, ik ga naar de winkel, I say, “I am going to the store.” If I were to literally translate that in German, it's something along the lines of - Ich gehe zum Winkel. That will leave the average German puzzled. That is, because in German, Winkel means “angle.” And if you're saying, you're going to the angle, that probably would raise some questions.
So, you may be wondering what the other differences are.
Because of the High German consonant shift, a lot of words are spelled differently. This is not where it stops; however, because German and Dutch spelling rules continue to differ on various other aspects.
Here are three examples where spelling rules differ:
The first one: The spelling rules for capital letters.
Generally speaking, Dutch follow the same spelling rules as in English, with the exception of months and days of the week. They're not capitalized in Dutch.
German, on the other hand, capitalizes each and every noun.
The second one is that in Dutch, non-loan words never end with a double letter.
For example, the verb “to want” in German is spelled as W-I-L-L, while in Dutch, it's spelled as W-I-L, only one L.
The third one is about plurals.
Plurals are easy in Dutch. They either end in E-N or with an -S.
In German, it's just a bit harder to grasp as nouns are declined in various different endings and the rules are harder to learn. Having three genders does not make it any easier.
Does that mean that spelling rules in Dutch are way easier?
Sadly, it does not. It is sometimes joked that Dutch spelling rules have an exception to the exception of the exception of the exception of the main rule. This partly has to do with De TaalUnie. This is an organization created by the Dutch and Belgian Government to govern the spelling of the Dutch language. In the Netherlands, De TaalUnie is the only organization that can change the official spelling rules that is used by the government and is taught in schools. This high degree of standardization means that sometimes, awkward spelling of words remain in place for a very long time.
Before we move on with the differences in grammar, I'll mention a funny thing both languages have in common. Nouns are written together, no spaces. This leads to monster words in Dutch like... Kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedencomitelétinden.
That’s one Dutch word for “children's carnival parade preparation committee members.” Or in German, they have the word…
Rindfleischetikettierungsuberwachungsaufgabenubertragungsgesetz.
That’s the German word for “a law to delegate monitoring of veal labeling.”
Just as a side note, you won't find these words in a dictionary, as no one normally uses this word. They remain grammatically correct though.
That being said, let's move on to grammar.
When it concerns articles, Dutch only has two genders. This is still harder than the English with their “the,” but still much easier than the many different ones German have.
There's also one indefinite article which is easy to remember. In Dutch it's “een.”
The negative indefinite article is always “geen,” always.
The third gender is the common gender, either masculine or feminine. This group is known as de-noun.
For example, de boom. This means “the tree.”
As trees have the masculine gender in Dutch, it's a de-noun.
The second gender is neuter known as het-noun.
For example, he huis. This means “the house.”
As houses have a neuter gender in Dutch, it is a het-noun.
There's one exception to nouns not having three genders.
This is when referring back to nouns using the possessive, then gender does play a role. I'll illustrate that with the following example…
De raad beslist. Haar beslissing werd goed ontvangen.
This literally translates to “The council decides. Her decision was well-received.”
Because Dutch only knows two genders, this means that Dutch has no cases. It's always “de” or “het.” Even with plural, we simply use “de” for that. No more “der,” “die,” or “das.” Prepositions don't change a single thing. This does make life easier as Germans sometimes don't even agree amongst themselves, but gender should be assigned to a specific word. Take the word “butter” as an example. The Southern Bundesländer and much of Switzerland and part of Austria say “butter” is masculine. The rest of the German-speaking population use it as a feminine word.
As Dutch and German have the same ancestor language, this means that Dutch used to have cases, so one can sometimes pop up in old expressions or names.
For example, the official name for The Netherlands in Dutch is Koninkrijk der Nederlanden translates to “Kingdom of The Netherlands.”
Leaving gender and case behind us, let's talk about another grammatical point, word order.
The basic word order for Dutch and German and a bunch of other languages is subject-verb-object. In Dutch and German; however, we have something peculiar going on, and this is known as the subject-verb-object-verb order, in more complex sentences. This is also known as the V2 word order.
Let me illustrate this with an example.
“I am going to learn something about the differences between Dutch and German today.
In Dutch, that would be…
Ik ga vandaag wat over de verschillen tussen Nederlands en Duits leren.
In German, it would be…
Heute werde ich etwas über den Unterschied zwischen Niederländisch und Deutsch lernen.
Those are very long sentences, so I’ll break them down to make it easier to understand. In English, all the verbs are at the beginning of the sentence - “I am going to learn…”
In Dutch and German, only the conjugated word “gaan” in Dutch or “werden” in German is at the beginning of a sentence. The infinitive “leren” in Dutch or “lernen” in German is at the end of the sentence. This is something typical of Dutch and German.
The exact word order of the V2 position is slightly different between Dutch and German. When it comes to auxiliary verbs, the order in Dutch is auxiliary verb + infinitive. In German, it's the opposite way around, infinitive + auxiliary verb.
I will illustrate this with an example.
“This is a television series that one should definitely watch.
In Dutch…
Dit is een televisieserie, die men beslist zou moeten kijken.
And in German…
Das ist eine TV-Serie, die man unbedingt anschauen sollte.
Note again how in Dutch, the correct sentence is moeten kijken and in German is anschauen sollte.
And that wraps up today's lesson. I discussed how the High German consonant shift is the cause of many spelling differences between Dutch and German. After that, I went into detail about the difference in spelling and continued through the differences in grammar.
In conclusion, how similar are Dutch and German really? Without the High German consonant shift, they would be very similar. Because the shift took place, German diverged from Dutch and it's also where most differences in pronunciation and spelling come from. In the future, the difference may become slightly smaller or slightly bigger, depending on how both languages evolve. Thanks for tuning in. Bye! Tot ziens!

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