Keskustelujen arkisto

>
> Come to think of it, there are no references in the English language
> to the Dutch other than negative ones, at least that come to mind.
> So political correctness will indeed have the effect of making the
> Dutch be a non-nationality. Well, maybe "dutch oven" or "dutch doors",
> but in a modern household, who sees those any more. If you ask school
> children what do they know about the Dutch, they will tell you that
> they wear wooden shoes. Of course, the English word for a wooden
> shoe is "sabot", and that in turn has given us "sabotage" (literally,
> "the damage done to machinery by wooden shoes"). So Dutch is definitely
> a dirty word in English! By the way, I didn't know that Daan Jippes is
> from Friesland ("the Lapland of Holland"). Does he therefore speak
> Frisian as his native tongue? Frisian is the language mostly closely
> related to English of all the other Teutonic languages, and native
> speakers of English thus find a Frisian accent disconcertingly foreign
> and familiar at the same time. Have those of you on the list who have
> met Jippes found this to be the case?
>
> Wilmer Rivers
>
Actually, I believe the word "sabot" is French. The English word for
wooden shoe is wooden shoe, as far as I know. Most of those negative
"Dutch" expressions date back some centuries to when England and Holland
were trade rivals, and Holland was more on the English mind than it has
been since. For that matter, most seem to be dying out. "Dutch treat"
is about the only living example: "Dutch uncle," being "in Dutch, "Dutch
courage," etc. seem to be nearly extinct. Frisian may be "closest" to
English in some technical grammatical sense, but from what I've seen of
it on the printed page, it's still a lot closer to Dutch, and unreadable
by a native English-speaker without special study. I'd rate Afrikaans, a
sort of stripped-down, streamlined Dutch with a lot of English influence,
as easier for an English-speaker to learn to read than anything else.
I've met Jippes, but can't remember anything about his accent being
striking one way or the other.

Just happened to remember one of Disney's early "Alice" shorts was called
"Alice in Dutch." The title is almost meaningless today; I'd think the
reference was to the Dutch-dubbed version of Disney's Alice in Wonderland.

Years ago, the National Lampoon did a satire of ethnic conspiracy theories
by fearlessly exposing "the International Dutch Conspiracy." According to
this, the Dutch were sneakily plotting to drain the entire Atlantic Ocean
dry and then invade America and saw all our doors in half.

Note to Tryg: I've read that the origin of the name of Sambo's restaurants
was a combination of syllables of the original founders' names. I've also
heard that "Little Black Sambo" was originally Indian (which makes sense
since in the story a tiger runs so fast that it melts and turns to butter--
and tigers are found in India, not Africa). It was only later that the
connotations, implications, subtexts, and hidden messages were read into it.

Note to Harry: In the Money Ocean story, "liquid capital" was Gary Gabner's
joke. My version was that because all of Scrooge's money was in the one
gigantic bin, and because Magica's hurricane was preventing access to it,
Scrooge wasn't able to pay his regular bills and he was being slapped with
late charges and lawsuits for non-payment. I fear that clarity was sacrificed
for the sake of a joke here.

Note to David: The last panel of that Strobl story really bothers me. Scrooge
holding the Beagles at bay with a pistol like that seems wrong, whether it's
"legal" by Disney standards or not. Scrooge holding a blunderbuss without even
pointing it anybody would be funny and make the same point; Scrooge pointing a
pistol at the Beagles like he's ready to execute them on the spot is crass
and unfunny. If Disney doesn't have a policy about star characters not
threatening other characters with guns, after seeing this panel I'm ready
to argue that Disney should.

--Dwight Decker

Dwight Decker writes:
> For what it's worth, "Dutch"
> was then loosely applied to Germans as well (thus Pennsylvania Dutch).

That's because the members of the Amish sect who migrated to Pennsyl-
vania retain strong linguistic and cultural ties to their German
background, and thus are properly known as the "Pennsylvania Deutsch".
I suspect the corruption of "Deutsch" to "Dutch" accounts for The Lost
Dutchman mine, as well. In the case of the Pennsylvania Dutch, there
is a further complication, in that the Amish are often confused with
the Mennonites, a sect which was founded in Friesland. The Amish are
noted for their devotion to a simple, rural life, and they are recog-
nized by their "old-fashioned" clothing and furniture and by their
refusal to drive modern, flashy cars or farm vehicles, using instead
horses and buggies or very old, basic black automobiles. Does this
sound like one of Donald's relatives whom we all know? Specifically,
is Grandma a member of the Pennsylvania Ducks?

Wilmer Rivers

Hi,
I love the Disney-comics digest conversations, BUT
I think there is just a bit too much mail for me.
Any possibilities to get shortened, or somehow concised or just weekly
"shipments"? I'm simply getting too much mail, not just Digests !
I do understand that I may lose something, but that's less concern than too
much mail that I just don't have time to read.
Greeting Matti

rivers at seismo.CSS.GOV (Wilmer Rivers) writes:
>Frisian is the language mostly closely
>related to English of all the other Teutonic languages, and native
>speakers of English thus find a Frisian accent disconcertingly foreign
>and familiar at the same time.

deckerd at agcs.com (Dwight Decker) adds:
>Frisian may be "closest" to
>English in some technical grammatical sense, but from what I've seen of
>it on the printed page, it's still a lot closer to Dutch, and unreadable
>by a native English-speaker without special study.

You're both right, of course. Geneaologically, Frisian is the language
most closely related to English--they're the only surviving languages
from the West Germanic branch of Indo-European. Frisian is only about
English's second cousin; its grandfather tongue and Anglo-Saxon were
closely related. Anglo-Saxon, however, to brutally extend the metaphor,
married foreigners while Frisian kept itself within the family.
It's really more that English doesn't resemble Anglo-Saxon than it
doesn't resemble Frisian. (During the Norman occupation, English
dramatically altered its pronunciation and grammar and imported many
thousands of Franco-Norman words. Modern English (since about the Sixteenth
Century) also imported many more Latin and Greek words. The end result
is a language which doesn't sound like German/Dutch/Frisian or have
sentences built like German/Dutch/Frisian and which has a vocabulary
made up in large part of words which aren't German/Dutch/Frisian.)

ObDuck: Terror of the Transvaal, like all duck comics, sold out at my
local store within a day. I've asked the manager why she doesn't increase
her order, but she says there's no market for them. Go figure.

greg
--
"A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practised human sacrifice,
except that they didn't really need to practice any more because they had
got so good at it."--Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

elmo (morrow at physics.rice.edu,morrow at fnal.fnal.gov)

I would like to endorse Don Rosa's expression of enjoyment at this
excellent electronic fanzine, and I would therefore like to express
special thanks to the man who made - and still makes - it all
possible, namely Per Starback! Thanks, Per, for all your efforts
at keeping the e-mail coming, in spite of every day's changes in the
topology of the Internet. As for Don's comments that some people
have trouble finding this most excellent rest stop along the Information
Superhighway, I suppose it is up to us on the list to help make other
Disney comics fans aware of it. To that end, I would suggest that we
plant road signs wherever we can (as has been done with periodic
messages on rec.arts.comics.misc and rec.arts.disney.misc, hasn't it?).
I have made a miniscule contribution by adding hypertext links from my
home page (http://info.acm.org/~rivers/homepage.html) to both this
mailing list (mailto:disney-comics-request at minsk.docs.uu.se) and to
the excellent World-Wide Web(foot) home page which Per has set up for
this group (http://www.update.uu.se/~starback/disney-comics.html).
I would suggest that everyone else on the list do likewise, to help
get the word out. Perhaps including the list's e-mail address in any
letters that we write to comics publications such as CBG or Disney
comics' own letter columns would be helpful. I suspect that in the
future **all** fanzines will be e-zines, but none will be nicer to
read than this one!

Wilmer Rivers

Thanks to Wilmer for the kind words. *blush*
Yes the list is mentioned in the appropriate net.places in the FAQs
for rec.arts.comics and rec.arts.disney. Maybe what's needed is as
you say more plugs for it in non-electronic media where Disney comics
fans are likely to hang out. It has been mentioned in NAFS(k)'s
newsletter and is mentioned in Dana Gabbard's information sheet on
resources for Disney (comics) fans at least.

Just one word to prospective list pluggers: Please never say "there's
this mailing list disney-comics at minsk.docs.uu.se ..."
Please only mention the administrative address
"disney-comics-request at minsk.docs.uu.se" to new subscribers to avoid
having them send their requests to all members.
-- "
Per Starback, Uppsala, Sweden. email: starback at minsk.docs.uu.se

Don, you ask why it is so difficult to "locate the Disney comics
section on INTERNET". That's because disney-comics is a mailing list,
not a newsgroup. You read newsgroups in News readers. Those are
programs that can list all available newsgroups, and then allow you to
select the desired ones. Mailing list entries are sent as private
electronic mail to the list members. Newsgroups are more therefore
more public than mailing lists. To get on a list, you (as you know)
have to contact the list administrator. And I dont't think there is
any 'official' list of mailing lists. So if we want to have more
people on the list, we have to advertise in appropriate places, like
Wilmer and Per(?) do (with the administrative list address).

(But here at the University of Oslo, disney-comics also _is_ a
newsgroup, because Per has put our News system as a member of the list.
This has been described by Per and Jorgen before.)

--- Helge

Nice to read that that beeeg digest with a lot of non-Disney stuff
was still appreciated. Here's some more about Indexes and Holland...
--------
OLE (ah finally - a letter from RoC!):

Since you already have subscriptions to Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German and Dutch
Disney magazines, and plan to get the English one: you won't regret it when you
subscribe to the French Picsou Magazine!

I did not get a *recent* letter from you, about tree-structures or anything.

If you put the story codes in the right format, your Danish index would match
perfectly in the NEW version of the Database. Anders Engwall and I already
adjusted the Swedish database (as a.o. Fredrik asked for): if a Swedish title
of a story is available and known, it is included.

I constantly adjust the programs that accompany the Database ('DIZNIREP' was
one of them, once). It's a good idea to let the user choose a language. I'll
build it in if I can. A version that can be used by 'ornery folks' is expected
before the end of the next century. ("No machine can be so smart that the dumbest
person can work with it".)

BTW: the part 'DIZNI' of my program's names was inspired by the (former)
Yougoslavian Disney comic 'Diznilend'! They really spell(ed) it that way!
--------
MITCHELL:

> >like "Surr-tenly! Det's my geop". But would that be a clear Dutch
> >accent to an American reader?

> As an American, I read 'geop' as 'jee-awp'. Maybe 'chob' or 'jop'?

I meant to express a 'g'-sound without the preceding 'd', like the French do
in 'jardin' ([zh] in stead of [dzh]). I realise now that 'ge' is not the right
transcription for that, but I can't find a better one.

Now that I think of it, some Dutch may pronounce the word as 'shop'.
--------
WILMER:
> By the way, I didn't know that Daan Jippes is
> from Friesland ("the Lapland of Holland"). Does he therefore speak
> Frisian as his native tongue?

Not necessarily. He may have moved at young age to a city in Holland (I
mean, the western part of the Netherlands). I don't know.
--------
DWIGHT:
> Most of those negative "Dutch" expressions date back some centuries to
> when England and Holland were trade rivals

Yeah... the Dutch had four sea-wars with England in the 17th and 18th century.

> Frisian may be "closest" to
> English in some technical grammatical sense, but from what I've seen of
> it on the printed page, it's still a lot closer to Dutch, and unreadable
> by a native English-speaker without special study.

Part of the unreadability can be because the spelling uses Dutch letters,
e.g. the 'j' to express the consonant 'y', or 'tsj' which sounds like
'ch'. (e.g. Tsjerke = Church)

BTW: does anyone remember the cartoon "Pluto in Dutch"? The locals almost
talk German there!
--------
WILMER (again):
> Specifically, is Grandma a member of the Pennsylvania Ducks?

Well, I once proposed that Cornelius Coot was Dutch, and accoring to
Don's family tree, Grandma is a Coot. So if not Pennsylvania Dutch, Grandma
could be a Mennonite?

--Harry.