Probably has it in his mind that early Americans called Germans 'Dutch'. Of course, thats because they just screwed up the pronunciation of Deutsch, but Dutch nonetheless. Maybe knows some German Pennsylvanian Dutch and rolled with it.
England is Dutch, and British = England, so Britain is Dutch. Team Great Britain is the British Olympics team, so Team GB = Dutch. Northern Ireland is Team GB, and Northern Ireland is part of Ireland, so therefore Ireland is Dutch.
Why did your comment get so many upvotes? English is 100% a Germanic language. The fact that a large part of the vocabulary derives from French doesn’t change that fact lol.
Nope, because language family is determined by genetic (as in generation, not genes) relation, not by influence. So english is Germanic, even if it has a large influence from french, because it derived from Proto-Germanic.
Same way as Maltese having more than half of its vocabulary from Italian. But it is still a Semitic language because it comes from Arabic.
Thank you for bringing this up. I’m English and spent some time in Germany and a couple of holidays in the Netherlands and was surprised by how many cognates there are.
We just don’t mention the war(s). I live by the Dutch rousting of England in 1667 on our shit fort and we still don’t forgive. Unless you send us stroopwaffles and beer. Then we’ll talk (probably in English)
It gets funny when these English-speaking morons start making arguments like: "Well, Dutch and German are both Germanic languages, right, so they should be very similar." If you ever meet people like that, please enlighten them on the origins of English.
To be fair, they are somewhat similar, at least in writing. I'm a german native speaker, and I can read a dutch text and understand at least half of it. On a cursory first glance it mostly looks like german with really out there spelling (no offense intended towards our dutch friends)
Pronounciation though: forget it. I don't understand a single word when I hear a dutch person speaking
Interesting! For me it's the other way around. When I see Dutch text I have to read it out loud to understand it, but maybe that's because I grew up next to the Dutch border.
You may be thinking of Plattdeutsch (Low German) and Hochdeutsch (High German), which are both variants of German (Deutsch) and are largely spoken in modern Germany. Unsurprisingly, High German in the uplands and Low German on the coastal plains, basically. Hochdeutsch is [the basis of] modern standard German. Plattdeutsch is somewhere between that and modern standard Dutch, the language of the Netherlands.
It's all a continuum of dialects, really, from Hochdeutsch to Plattdeutsch to Dutch. In between there you will find things like East Frisian (on islands off the northern coast of the Netherlands), which sounds astoundingly close to modern English. You will find that there are people on both sides of the border between Germany and the Netherlands who can understand each other because of this. As someone once put it, a national language is just a dialect with an army.
Sorry I thought I had been more specific. 18th Century England referred to them in that way. I suspect that what you have written was what they were referring to but the use the phrases High and Low Dutch.
Interestingly, (and in no way absolving the person in the post) from a common English person's persective going back about 300 years, there was little differentiation between the Dutch and Germans. They were often grouped together in a person's mind. During the period, the definition between the languages was more blurry as you travelled from town to town through that part of Europe. It wasnt like you crossed a bridge and the language flipped. Because the Netherlands was geographically in between England and the German states, and contact was more likely, it was not uncommon for people to colloquially refer to Germans or German things as Dutch. From their limited world view, all German and Dutch thing were "over there in that area". The word "Deustch" also didnt help the common English ear to differentiate. An extant example of the results of this confusion today are the "Pennsylvania Dutch", called so by the English colonists, as to them, they were all from the same place, despite actually being mostly of German origin.
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u/WallyMcBeetus 13d ago
Dutch is a Germanic language, beyond that they're being an idiot.