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[felis_ultharus]

It hath now been hours and I'm still trying to figure out how an intelligent, well-educated francophone employee of a major federal government ministry could have thought that the standard English word for "les gens" was "the gigolo."

I can only assume it's the result of a prank by a malicious English-speaker. I'm not really allowed to point out people's mistakes during these placement tests, so I couldn't actually ask her.

I also wonder how many times she's written "gigolo" in place of "people" on government documents. If you get any government documents with the word "gigolo" in it where the word "people" should be, you know I've spoken to that woman.

So, yeah -- it was an interesting day giving English-as-a-second-language placement tests.

Another breakthrough in my editing has put me about one-fifth of the way through my major edit.

Comments

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Access Denied? That does't sound so bad...?

No, but the Dutch were the people we were trying to keep out; I wanted to make sure that I wasn't writing PARTY HERE on everything, just in case. ^_^;; The "geen" part was right for a negative, but "Toegang" doesn't look particularly familiar, other than the -gang ending, which seems to be equivalent to -gung in German, making something a noun.

I have seen people run into problems similar to your restaurant example above when their French-English-French dictionaries only translate "embracer" as "to embrace" and "baiser" as "to kiss". Most embarrassing, that is. I would crusade against inadequate dictionaries, but it's too entertaining to explain. ^_^

[seal7.livejournal.com]

Though we like to form nouns with -gung, the German for that would've been Kein Zugang, which is also a -gang word.
In any case I can see how you understand Dutch people ;) when you know German it's really possible. I'm vaguely surprised; I was even able to tell someone about the content of a news article from a Dutch webpage once. Crazy stuff.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

...aha! Lightbulb moment. I was trying to figure out where the got the negative "geen" from, as it looks nothing like "nicht" or even "nee", their word for "no". Obviously there's been a consonant shift and it comes from "kein". It's actually pretty consistent; German hard s --> Dutch z, as in "zee", 'sea'; German z --> Dutch t, as in "toegang", which is pronounced almost exactly like "Zugang", missing the voiced 's' after the initial 't'.

There's also a slight vowel shift, where oo = German long o, uu = ü, and eu is almost an ö but not quite.

They also use German slang, or at least common slang, although they tend to deny it. ^^; Explaining something at the desk often gets a casual, "ah, toll," as an answer, for example.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It's possible to get the gist of Dutch as a unilingual English speaker, too -- it's partway between English and German. "White" is closer to "witt" than "weiss," and "the" is closer to "de" than it is to "der/das/die/den/des..."

I've heard Friesland-dialect Dutch is closer to English than any other living language.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that "baiser" is "to kiss" in most high-school-level French-English dictionaries. Someone out there has a twisted sense of humour.

[sorceror.livejournal.com]

I made that mistake once in French class. My poor teacher had to explain that I hadn't got it quite right...