![]() The Dutch capital, Amsterdam, is a bustling city with canals and bridges everywhere which makes the city so particular and attractive. Learning Dutch words with the Langenscheidt dictionary will be a walk in the park and the logic behind fusing two Dutch words together to make a new one is something you already know, at least intuitively.Īpart from the language itself and the pleasure you can derive from learning Dutch, the Netherlands is a treasured destination to many tourists from Europe and even worldwide. As such, Dutch is a friendly language and rather easy to learn once you have covered the basic grammatical points. You can listen to an Argentinian song, but it is sung by an Argentine.German-Dutch dictionary The charm of the Dutch language to the German earĭutch has a language that is very close to German hearing Dutch might not feel like it, but upon reading Dutch, you will soon realize that Dutch shares a lot of similarities with German. It’s also important not to confuse demonyms with adjectives. ![]() As with most vocabulary in English, they all now coexist and serve the same purpose. The suffix -ese most directly meant “belonging to or originating in a place,” while -(a)n and -ian are variations on the same suffix meaning “belonging to.” The suffix -er was used principally in the sense of “one having to do with a thing,” as in lawyer or villager. The other suffixes came from Latin, though they each convey slightly different senses. ish actually comes from Old English, which is why citizens of the British Isles have -ish demonyms: Scottish, Welsh, English, etc. Where did these suffixes come form? Latin, of course. The most common suffixes that denote place are: -(a)n ( Chicagoan), -er ( New Yorker), -ese ( Chinese), -ian ( Norwegian), and -ish ( English). In English we denote place of origin by suffixes. (Parts of what we call Germany was called Prussia until 1932.) The people came before the official government and place name. In some cases, the demonym preceded the place name. For example, Finland is the place where the Finns live, just as Germany is the place where the Germans live. Over time, Holland, among English speakers, came to apply to the entire country, though it only refers to two provinces-the coastal North and South Holland-in the Netherlands today. The word Holland literally meant “wood-land” in Old English and originally referred to people from the northern region of the Netherlands. The term was so widely used that when they became a formal, separate country in 1815, they became the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Within the Holy Roman Empire, the word Netherlands was used to describe people from the low-lying ( nether) region ( land). ![]() Low Dutch referred to people from the flatlands in what is now the Netherlands. (At that point in time, in the early 1500s, the Netherlands and parts of Germany, along with Belgium and Luxembourg, were all part of the Holy Roman Empire.) Specifically the phrase High Dutch referred to people from the mountainous area of what is now southern Germany. Over time, English-speaking people used the word Dutch to describe people from both the Netherlands and Germany, and now just the Netherlands today. The Old English cousin to Dutch, thiod or theod, simply meant “people or nation.” (This also helps explain why Germany is called Deutschland in German.) How the heck did people from the Netherlands become the Dutch, for example? Where Dutch came fromīefore we dig into this demonym, there are three terms we need to define: Holland, the Netherlands, and Dutch. But what about the demonyms that are seemingly random? Californians are people who live in California. A demonym is any name derived from a place that helps describe people who live there.
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