Five Brothers and a War

The Dutch Language—Accents

DUTCH

SOUND

COMMENT

Does not change the sound, but adds emphasis

É/é

umlaut

Only used to separate syllables when it would not be obvious. In English, the word “skiing” is not obvious. Using the Dutch protocol for the umlaut, it would be spelled “skiïng” and “coordinate” would be “coördinate”. This is not only true for double vowels, but could also be used to differentiate the sound “oa” as in “boat” from “boa” as in constrictor—“boä”.

Dutch typically pluralizes words through the use of “en” at the end of a noun. So, kers (“cherry”) becomes kersen (“cherries”), and oog (“eye”) becomes ogen (“eyes”). This is not universal, however, as appel (“apple”) becomes appels (“apples”). What is very different from English though is the use of the apostrophe to pluralize words. The Dutch word foto (“photo”) becomes foto’s , which does not connote possession in any way. It was intended to simply avoid the problem of having the word be fotos, which would be pronounced more like “fo-toss” (rather than “fo-toes”). That word would not seem plural to a Dutch speaker. In Dutch, apostrophes are only used to show possession when the noun is proper, and then only when that proper noun ends in a vowel. Thus, “Oma’s” would be correct, but “Tom’s” would not be. The exceptions would be when the proper noun ends with an “e” or an “s”, such as “Kees’”, “Bertus’ or “Gijs’”. “Leens”, “Piets”, or “Jans” would be possessive.

holland

While not Dutch, a note about the use of “ß” in this book:

Within the German language, the letter represented by “ß” is called the “Eszett” or the “Scharfes S”. In English it would be substituted for a double “s”. Thus, Arthur Seyß Inquart could be spelled Arthur Seyss-Inquart. This book uses the “ß” instead of “ss”.

Five Brothers and a War

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