The fad here at the moment is to use English in written and spoken communication. You hear it in conversations, on the telly, in letters from the bank and other businesses. This injecting of foreign words into our language is a bit irritating to me, not that I am a purest or anything. Aside from that we can find traces from all manner of foreign words in our language that have been introduced and now are considered native. I think that the most common interloper is French, there are also words that are the same and similar from German and Scandinavian. All understandable, considering our history, but now this most recent contaminant is English. You see someone on the telly say something like, “When I saw that, I was completely flabbergast” (all other words would be Dutch except for ‘flabbergast’). Similarly, you might hear someone say, “an auto was broken into down the street and now I am paranoia”. They think is sounds cool and interesting to show off but casually dropping the odd English word here and there...but then in the wrong form. It doesn’t come over cool or interesting, it comes over dumb. A while back the municipality was re-doing a roundabout near our lottie complex it took six weeks of working only on the weekends so they could close off the road. Even on the weekends it caused an enormous bicycle and auto problems. Finally the rotunda was removed, asphalt laid and lines on the road were sprayed. They were very proud of themselves for re-inventing this wheel, so they had a press release in the newspaper, and to show off just that little bit more, they also provided their proud moment in English...in the paper. Look at this: Just ignore the paragraph above, that is Dutch. The second paragraph is English. This excerpt from the paper isn’t so much riddled with misspellings as the structure and word choices. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any dumber. There was this on a “House For Sale” website. Mates, I have been posting on here for ages so you all know that my English is not 100% perfect. I make typo’s and misspellings as well as grammatical errors all the time. Having said that I have to tell you that my Bride found this last piece the dumbest of all. My Bride discovered this last one and it wound her up so much that she wrote a letter to the business and included the “English text” that they had in their advertisement...complete with red markings by the worst errors. There are many, but she also told them that the grammatical errors and sentence structure issues were not even addressed. She got back a very nice letter with apologies, and shock at what someone in her team had produced. Why don’t you read that “English” text and see how many mistakes you can find. Perhaps keeping it just to misspelled words, otherwise you might be busy a long time. I thought about putting her marked text on here, but then you wouldn’t have had the fun of hunting and discovering.
I have always hated people putting 'slang' words into speech - for instance things like 'gobsmacked' and 'fantabulous.' It's not just kids using them it's adults as well!! Nowadays it's even worse as news readers are using them too and getting their grammar and tenses wrong. I find it almost painful to listen to them as I have always loved 'The Queen's English' that I was taught as a child. Things like " I was sat sitting" or "They have got" really set my teeth on edge. As for all the American slang we hear on the television - just don't get me started!! I read the passage you posted advertising a property. I actually found it hard to read and I would have done the same thing as your bride. I just hope the letter of apology she received was grammatically correct.
Oh dear. Your two examples make even me cringe. English isn't my first language. I know I don't always write or speak gramatically correct even though I try. I usually show tolerance when I see or hear errors from persons who obviously do not have English as their first language. That said, official sites, real estate brokers, and businesses overall really should have correct English in their publications, or no English at all. As for your anglification rant, it's the same here.
I can't answer for the Netherlands, but I can for Norway. We have a lot of foreign workers, some immigrants and refugees, and we want to include these people in official and business communication. They might want to find somewhere to live, apply for a job, or just want to find the right office to contact regarding rules and regulations. Our hope and goal is that our non-Norwegian speaking inhabitants will learn Norwegian, but until then we try to keep them updated in English. I've been told. Because I asked.
Eileen, it was pretty wild, wasn’t it. Full marks to you for going to the trouble of reading that real estate story in English. It wasn’t really easy was it. Droopy—As I said, your explanation was eloquent and mirrors our situation. Cayu, our municipal, provincial and national governments do the same as what Droopy outlined above. This extends to hospitals and public services. The reasoning behind using foreign languages is the same as in Norway. We want to help people who come here to live and work. She has really expressed the position very eloquently and exactly. Further there are many ex-pats living and working here for international companies. It was interesting to note that on that real estate site the little translation that I showed was only for one house and done by one real estate agency. Looking at the price of the property, I suspect that these ex-pats were the prospective buyers that were targeted in this instance.
