language mix-ups

anyone learning a language will admit that they have language mix-ups. when i was learning hungarian, i was forever forgetting prepositions (they go after the word instead of before it). now with dutch, the mix-ups are a bit different - and a lot of them have to do with the fact that english and dutch are quite similar at times. sometimes i miss it, because english and dutch is interchanged in my head and around me so much i don't notice the problems, but sometimes somebody catches it.

i have a problem with certain vowels, mostly the "o"s and "u"s. and i tend to add whichever vowel seems to fit with the picture of the word i have in my head. in dutch just like in english, a cats (kat) can also be called "puss" (pronounced like the (french) cat in "Puss in boots"). the problem is that in dutch they don't spell it the french way, they spell it the dutch way. so when i sent a picture of the poes and labelled it pus, the dutch reader would be a bit nervous about opening the picture. because the label on the picture wasn't referring to a cat, but instead referred to that nasty yellow substance that comes out of pimples..

although dutch and english are fairly similar, words that sound the same don't always mean the same thing. the dutch word for nylons is panties. and in dutch, it's perfectly acceptable to talk about not biking with "panties" - after all nylons never seem to stretch in the right way and tend to break - leggings work much better. but as an english-speaking friend of mine pointed out, talking about biking without panties (in english) is not exactly something one would want to do!

the other day as i was sitting in a faculty division meeting at work, the person in charge kept talking "sexy" this and "sexy" that. i figured at first it was an inside joke. but i saw no one else smiling, so then i figured it was an acronym where no one had thought about how it sounded in english. about five minutes later, i realized that what i'd been hearing as "sexy" was actually sectie (which is really pronounced the same as sexy). and we were actually talking about the section or division. a pity actually, it would have been much more lovely to talk about how sexy biblical studies really are.