It’s a thing of steam-punked beauty. Coppery. We’re not installing it yet. I can get by with what I have. The ceiling with the lights is nearly finished, and we’ve found a way to move some wiring onto other breakers so that I won’t have the toaster, coffeemaker, dishwasher and fridge all on the same little breaker. Yay! I won’t have to run down to throw the breaker because I forgot and toasted something while coffee was brewing.
We have functioning lights, and the new faucet came.
by CJ | Oct 13, 2017 | Journal | 27 comments
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I lived for several years in a two-bedroom house, built in the 50s, with four circuits for the electrical outlets. You couldn’t run the vacuum cleaner or the AC with anything else on the same circuit. (Gas range. Teeny gas water-heater. Gas heating.)
Funny how, back then, they didn’t foresee at all the proliferation of electrical stuff we now see as necessities, and they had no idea whatsoever of the communications and information revolution that was coming in computers, phones, audio-video. Just having a single phone in the hallway was a big deal. A small provision for electrical outlets in each room was a big deal. Now, we’ve had to figure how to run wires (or wireless routers) for power and data all over the house.
I’m reminded of the old Ma and Pa Kettle movies my parents loved, and I watched as a kid. I have no idea if they’re available on DVD/Blu-Ray or streaming. — And that’s another symptom or effect of the huge leaps we’re still making before anything settles out into a standard, stable form.
The sink fixtures sound really neat!
Looks like I may (finally) get another trip to my storage space next week. Although I have a short list of “I really want to find these fast” items, I think I’ll be lucky to find whatever I come across as I get to it. It’s a giant 3D puzzle, sort of Jenga meets Tetris meets I-dunoo-what. — My guitar, digital camera, some BJD stuff, and the rest of my jeans, several office and audio-video items, among other things, are on the short list. It’s wacky.
But I did get friends’ help to get several bags of stuff to a donation pickup site. I don’t know if it’ll be used here for Harvey relief or sent to Puerto Rico for relief there, but either way is very fine by me.
If folks have not heard of the song, “Almost Like Praying,” by Lin-Manuel Miranda, available from any of the music sites (iTunes, Amazon, etc.), all the proceeds are to go to relief aid for Puerto Rico. The song is a mix of lyrics from “Maria” from West Side Story with names of PR towns and rap and other lyrics, combined with Latino rhythms and samples of coquis, a tropical bird common on the island, with dozens of popular Latino singers. It’s good, very catchy.
I was under the impression that coquis are tree-frogs.
Just ask a Hawaiian! They’ve invaded. (You’re right.)
Faucets and lights, and a stove that stays put — things begin to come together. Now I’m riffing on the old Beatles song . . . ‘Come To-geh-tha … ovah ME. . . Gack. Earworm alert. . . .!
Actually, I started hearing ‘My Favorite Things’ from The Sound of Music 😛
The faucet sounds very pretty, and the wiring solution sounds much safer.
I’m glad it is all starting to come together.
Off topic, here’s a link to a WordPress blog post that might interest those here who are interested in active travel and designing better livable cities. Maybe Raesean would like it?
It’s by an Englishman working in those areas, on the stuff he noticed on a visit to the Netherlands that nobody told him about. It’s a bit like asking a fish what water is like, I guess – something so obvious and a natural part of the environment that you’ve never really thought about it; and the answer you’ll get will be very different from that which a land-creature would give. I like the way these outsider views open my eyes to my own surroundings.
And maybe, for other outsiders trying to strive toward more people-centric planning, his insights could be useful too.
I never got to visit the Netherlands when I made my overseas trips: I always used all my days where I landed…but I regret not doing it. My family tree is, on my mother’s side, Vandeventers (that’s their spelling), Couwenhovens, Monfoorts, Van Doorns, Schenks, Wykoffs and Hoogebooms,and so on back, and I’ve always wanted to go there, but my field of study being Mediterranean, I never quite managed the right landing-point. Closest I’ve been is Brussels…
Couwenhovers — That raises a name and etymology mystery.
There are Kopenhauer (or Kopenhaver) ancestors in my family tree from the 18th or 19th century; 19th, I think. The old gravestones use capitals and the old V U thing, and some markers, as well as some of the document spellings, use C instead of K, so Copenhaver, Copenhauer. And because the modern connection is lost in the area, I’m only guessing whether
they said -haver or -hauer.
I double-checked, and Copenhagen is in Denmark, Danish, but that is the English name for it. In Low German, it’s Kopenhagen. In Danish, it goes back to -hafn, cognate to English -haven, meaning the same, a safe haven, a safe harbor or port. So sometimes in Danish (and apparently, sometimes also in Dutch) what began as an -f-/-v- could end up an -h-/-g- (the blurry fricative g or palatal blurry fricative g which became a y or j sound in its English cousin).
So I’d have to defer to Hanneke to know, but it sure looks like there are plenty of cousin-words (cognates) in English, Dutch, and German for the Danish word, and so I’d guess Couwenhover, a Dutch name, is a Dutch local flavor for a family name for a cognate Dutch place name. Or a respelling into Dutch for Danish immigrants, maybe.
The etymology given on Wiki also says the oldest Danish form for the city’s name, Køpmænnæhafn, breaks down into Køp- -mænnæ- -hafn, and is therefore cognate with English as something like “Chapman Haven.” So again, a Dutch cognate or an assimilation of a Danish settler family seems likely.
Note: That and another name or two I’m not recalling right now, in my family tree, seem to be German or Dutch, but don’t show evidence of being Danish. My own family name’s origin is disputed due to cognates. It’s either a northern English (along the Scottish border) dialectal variant, or else it’s a German name. It shows the same F –> V and T –> S of other English words from northern dialect like (female) foxe / focse to vixen or the -t- to -s- (think glisten and whistle versus archaic glister for modern glitter). My family name gets confused with both Whitman, Wiseman, Weissman, and Wishman, because the English spelling confuses most fellow Americans. (Hint: It isn’t any of those names, but it’s very close, only one letter off or a transposition from two of those.)
That also led to a bit of medieval folklore and superstition which could be good or bad, depending on the views of the local folks. It’s common on my dad’s side of the family for some of the kids to have very light, almost white-blond hair as kids, which darkens as they grow up, to brown, and can sometimes still lighten in summer or with lots of exposure to the sun. This is the same kind of thing for other mammals who have summer and winter phase coloring for their coats. Other family members have stable, always-dark hair, while some have hair that stays blond, like mine.
The medieval folklore connection, though, is interesting. It seems that a very pale complexion (like mine, but in the family, it can be ruddy or freckled or tanned), or very pale blond hair (platinum, tow-headed, flaxen, tallow, were all used to describe that) — were seen as a connection to the elves, the fair folk or faeries, and so the idea was, if someone exhibited those traits, they might be in league with, or interbred with, or actually secretly elves / fair folk faeries, in, yes, the sense of the Fairy Queen story or changeling stories or the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But this could be regarded as a good or bad thing, and Old English has several names with Elf-, Alf-, Ælf-, or Alb-, All- in the name: Alfred (Elf-Counsel), Alfric (Elf-Ruler), Alvin (Elf-Friend, Alfwinn), even Alfbern (Elf-Bear). I hadn’t known about that last one, and it set off all sorts of imagination about elf-bears, and wondering about elf-cats, elf-dogs, elf-horses. Hmm, elf-cattle and elf-deer didn’t occur to me, but now, come to think of it….
OK, I’ve wandered very far off-topic, but it might be interesting to fellow fans and genealogy buffs.
So — It looks like the names Couwenhover and Kopenhaver (with C and/or V) stayed spelled differently enough over here in the Colonies that we’re not likely cousins on this side of the Atlantic from that line, but maybe somewhere further back. Maybe-maybe.
(I’d think that if we’re cousins at all, it would be somewhere among the Texas-Oklahoma relatives or if you have any Virginia-Tennessee-Kentucky relatives near Cumberland Gap and old Martin’s Station, or around 1755 in Pennsylvania Dutch country. — The earliest ancestors I have with my family name in America date to 1755 with Phillip / Philip and John / Johan / Johann with my last name in its current spelling (or spelled other ways by other people just as often as now). They had arrived from a port from England or the Netherlands, or else Copenhagen, to an American port, and promptly settled here, and they and their families moved from Pennsylvania down to Virginia over the next few decades, then staying in Virginia after around 1805 to 1820. There’s varying evidence on the age gap or exact relationship, so Phillip and Johann / John are listed as either father and son or brothers. They married and had kids. I’m presuming they weren’t cousins or uncle and nephew. The age gap was apparently 10 years, but possibly more, leading to other people’s confusion.
So I don’t have enough besides the other evidence, family stories saying we were “German” originally, or the preference to settle in German-speaking Pennsylvania colony, or intermarrying with both German / Dutch and English (and Scottish) neighbors once in Virginia, to guess at the real background of the original two young(?) men and their later family members.
Without researching it, my first associations with Couwenhoven are that
1) it’s a placename, as are Montfoort, Doorn and Deventer (van means from) – many people took their family names from their home town;
2) C is pronounced K in this, and Couwenhoven could well be an old spelling for Koudenhoven which means Cold Farms (or Cold Close, in the sense of a group of houses enclosing a small public garden-space, usually run by a religious order to house poor but worthy elderly people). The singular is HOF, plural HOVEN, but I think (not sure) in the old days when Dutch still had inflections, HOVEN might also have meant “from the hof”.
The adjective KOUDE is often pronounced KOUWE, as the noun is both KOU (informal, sounds just like KOUW) and KOUDE (oldfashioned, formal).
This seems much more likely to me than a link with Kopenhagen (or coppersmiths “koperslager” or whatever distant connections there might be linguistically) – the family coming from either the town of Couwenhoven or from a farm in a cold hollow or on the north side of an incline or a wood (and thus locally known as the cold farm) would be a more likely origin.
SCHENK means to pour, so that family probably named itself for keeping a bar in Napoleon’s time; the alternative meaning of to give a gift/present seems less likely.
HOOGEBOOM means high tree (modern spelling would be Hogeboom, as it breaks into syllables as ho-ge-boom, but names don’t get modernised), and I happen to have a colleague with that name.
Aha! OK, so I was on the wrong track there, it looks like, but learning all that is really cool. 🙂 “Hogeboom” — If I have my cognates right, “hoge” would be “high” in English and “hoch(e)” in German, and “boom” would be “beam” in English and “Baum” in German. “Highbeam” might be the English name equivalent. — Oh, wait, so “Corrie ten Boom,” her name translates to “the tree, the beam” ? Interesting. You learn all kinds of things by comparing and asking this way! (In the time of King James, Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth, a “beam in a camel’s eye” meant not just a splinter, but a log, a center beam or plank, or a tree. It could be used as a builder’s term (the center beam of a house’s rafters, or other beams) or the beam, a planed, dressed plank, for a table or bench at which one ate and on which one sat, respectively.) But in modern times, it’s become restricted more to the building term, and no longer springs to mind for English speakers in the meaning of a tree or log, or the beam of a table or bench.
Languages are filled with history and nuance and connotations, associations, shades of meaning.
— Also, I need to go back and look at that link you gave, from Raesean’s assessment.
Interesting! My mother’s paternal side was the Van Deventer group, from one Pieter Jans van Deventer, who bought passage for himself, his wife, and several children from, I think, Utrecht to New Amsterdam, and all lived to get to the place they’d planned, which says it was a better ship than some of my ancestors managed to engage. 😉 They were pretty prosperous, apparently having land on Manhattan and in New Jersey, but gave up their land and left for the Carolinas and eventually Tennessee, where they farmed as late as the Civil War, then my great-grandfather moved off from the family and went to Kansas (which was not exactly a peaceful place…)and finally, in the late 1800’s, into central Oklahoma territory. Apparently they were not the only ones with those roots—I can recall the days of party line telephones at my grandmother’s house, and there were two sisters who were on that line—sometimes you’d pick up the phone by mistaking the ring pattern (especially if you were a kid) and it was rude to listen in—but if you did,[and my uncle had half a dozen kids] and if they were telling a bit of gossip, I’m told they’d switch into Dutch when they got to the ‘good’ bit. I’m not sure who was the last to speak the language in my family, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my great-grandfather didn’t know a little.
Ours was van der Hoeven, which I am told means something like herdsman or cowboy. I have seen the name in Brussels, Belgium.
@Tommie, “HOEVE” in Dutch means farm, so that name VAN DER HOEVE literally means “from the farm” – generally either a dairy farm or a mixed agriculture/ market garden vegetables and grain type of farm, or an all-round combination with some wheat or other grain, dairy, potatoes and cabbages.
If they came from the coastal area, it could even be a tulip-bulb farm.
There are quite a few names that could be used for farms, like HOF (based on a word for a garden), HOEVE, HAVEZATE, BOERDERIJ (the modern general-purpose word for a farm), (HOF)STEE, STEDE, STATE (in Friesland) (the latter three all connect to the idea of a place to settle down in (e.g. a BEDSTEE is a bed built into a wall, with doors to keep out the cold), a settlement, related to the word STAD for town or city). There are regional and local variations in the more customary names as well as in building styles for farms.
HOEVE, plural HOEVES is not to be confused with HOEF (singular), HOEVEN (plural), meaning hooves, like on a cow or a horse… probably the idea of a farm combined with that of hooved animals led to the idea of a cowboy?
Exactly how I came up with ‘cowboy’! BTW, my family calls what you put the mattress on a bedstead… which now makes sense!
Thanks indeed, Hanneke, for the link to the blog. It was fascinating to read, look at and… listen to. I will indeed see about using this the next time I teach the urban planning section of my Geography course… And share it with frinds at my day job too who enjoy thinking on these topics.
Cambridge, Massachusetts just (a month or so ago) reprioritzed many of its streets into Harvard Square and nearby to encourage safe biking. Intersections where four or more streets come together are now very, very confusing to drive through. Partly this is because no one is used to it yet, partly because there are now complex diagrammatic white lines painted on the street driver (and presumably biker) has to decode as they enter.
Most intuitively useful are some smaller streets the city has now made one way, with parking in the middle of the street, driving one-way on one one side and a bike lane on the other side, protected by the cars.
Most infuriating for drivers and scary all around are the little, narrow bike lanes that have been created (over the past few years) out of already narrow streets by just painting a line near the edge of the street (and stenciling in a bike silhouette every so often as visual cue) about a meter/yard from the curb and declaring that “subtracted from the car lane” area for bikes. There is no physical separation of bike & car, people still pullover and park their cars in the now bike lane, sometimes leave their garbage cans, and generally ignore that it is supposed to be for bikes. It’s not just the drivers who are scary: many Cambridge cyclists don’t have reflectors/use lights on their bikes at night and we have nearly run over some in our car on those narrow, bike-lanes streets.
I think the blog’s point that the street/townscape must be designed holistically, with all elements integrated and consciously interacting is excellent. Cambridge is making a start, Boston across the river hardly has any bike lanes —but lots of bike deaths at big, traffic intersections though surprisingly few pedestrian deaths as most of its streets are narrow and we Boston pedestrians demand priority through conscious jay-walking.
Lots to think on and many changes to what I remember of the Nederlands when I visited in ’82 or so (a day in Amsterdam, then a week in Groenigen (sp?) and a day around Lieuwaarden (sp????)).
It’s Groningen and Leeuwarden (in Friesland), actually.
Problems with visibility at night need to be tackled with rules or laws – all bikes sold need to have lights and reflectors fitted as standard.
Bike lights front and rear, a red rear reflector (about 10 cm x 4 cm, 4×2 inch), and sideways reflecting wheels are compulsory in the Netherlands after dark. The last is easily realised because all manufactorers make reflective sidewalls on all bike tires sold in the Netherlands (both on bikes or separate). All pedals have small yellow reflective strips built in.
That way the bike is visible from every direction.
Those paint lanes do not make people safer, and intersections need to be fairly intuitive to use if you don’t want drivers to be distracted by deciphering the signs when they should be looking out for traffic.
That’s why those little almond-shaped corner islands work so well in protected intersections – drivers will go around those without thinking about it!
Most bicycles come automatically with those reflectors, but bike lights are usually an aftermarket addon. I’m particularly fond of the small strobes you can put on either front or rear; they are much more eyecatching than a reflector or non-blinking light.
If you are going to make roads bicycle friendly, it generally ought to be designed into them from inception, not just tacked on as an afterthought, otherwise it doesn’t satisfy either bikers or drivers.
Of note: Houston is particularly bad about not planning for either sufficient sidewalks for pedestrian traffic, or bike lanes for (duh) bicycle traffic (or perhaps pedestrians). That dates back at least to my grandmother’s day, and continues today. Houston is way too dependent on each person or family owning their own car, truck, van, etc., and cabs and buses as the main public transportation methods. — Back in the 30’s and 40’s, Houston had trolleys similar to the old San Francisco trolleys. (I am not sure if the couple of old trolly tokens she’d saved and had given to me years ago made it into my storage space in the move, sigh.) Houston has only a very limited monorail type system in the Medical Center / downtown area, and consistently has not voted in for larger-scale monorail or similar rail systems, or other things that would encourage bikes and so on. I don’t know how successful recent tries at “pedicabs” (rickshaw-like affairs) have been. But almost anything would be an improvement.
Funny thing, due to Houston’s and Texas’ heritage: Horses are legal in Houston, and some are still kept within the city limits. There are some limited mounted police units, but the main use is when the rodeo trail riders come into town for the rodeo in late February and early March. This is kept from the old days, and some portion of the trail riders are horse or cowboy enthusiasts, while others are reenacts, and still others are the genuine article, working cowboys and cowgirls from farms and ranches in Texas. But it is otherwise rare to see horses in the city on the streets. Yet it’s still legal, for those reasons. Ah, life is funny.
I would love to see improvements in bike and pedestrian lanes and sidewalks and other public transportation here. I would also love to see Houston try some of the “co-housing” or other community-based living setups, which look very interesting from an outside point of view. I’d think if those could work, they’d be good support for senior citizens, for handicapped/disabled folks, and for families with young kids, especially single-parent families. I’ve begun to think the 60’s/70’s folks were onto something, but didn’t experiment enough with working variations, towards semi-communal but also private living, like the co-housing or community living center ideas. It just seems like people need more support and assistance than they typically have in American cities. — But my new apartment complex seems very good about how many of the kids, boys mostly, some girls, get together to play in the patio / pool area here, along with their parents or other adults around then or separately at other times for time with their kids or for adult socializing. This is something I still need to get myself into.
It’s funny how wide-ranging things get on this blog! But it seems like there’s always something interesting that’s brought up by someone or other around here. I also love that we get such world-wide opinions. So thank you to CJ, for being a generous host.
@chondrite: even with a standard fitted dynamo light you can always add another!
As population grows or diminishes, use changes, and the surface deteriorates even with regular maintenance, streets need to be completely refurbished anyway once in a while (30 years is a fairly common renovation cycle in residential neighborhoods around here).
During such grand renovations streets can be completely redesigned.
In the meanwhile, the example that Raesean gave for the smaller streets works well: put the parked cars between the moving cars and the bicycle lane; especially if the city can put some cheap lay-down curbs (not anchored to a foundation) or plastic wands or cones between the parking lane and the cycleway until people get used to not parking in the cycle lane. It means people can’t park in the bicycle lane and force cyclists to go around into traffic, keeps both the roadway and cycleway free-moving at their own speeds, and provides an additional buffer between pedestrians and traffic – those cars can’t mount the pavement and kill people, and being further from the fumes makes both walking and biking more pleasant. Making streets one-way where necessary to make room for this makes sure all houses are still accessible by car, but helps to filter them (a few bollards might improve filtering, depending on the street pattern) and makes ‘rat-running’ through neighborhood streets instead of using the through-routes and freeways less attractive.
Those are all options that can be used in existing streets without completely redesigning them.
Those separate bike lanes behind the parked cars then lead naturally into the type of protected intersection mentioned above: stop the parking lane before the intersection and bulb out the pavement to make corners tighter for cars (so they slow down a bit) and make pedestrian crossings both shorter and safer; but (crucially!) continue the bike lane through the pavement bulb, bending out slightly if possible.
Intersections are the most dangerous points for all vulnerable road users, so don’t make cyclists join with cars and trucks and busses at intersections.
Keeping the cycle lane separate means that pedestrians can first cross the cycle lane (no lights needed, but zebras can be used), then wait on the bulbed-out pavement to cross the road. It also means that cars turning around the bulb-out will be near a 90 degree angle by the time they cross the path of ongoing cyclists and pedestrians, making it a lot easier to see each other and react in time to avoid accidents.
@BCS, Corrie den Boom would be Corrie the tree; Corrie ten Boom is Corrie at the tree (te = at, de = the, the -n is oldfashioned inflection).
@Hanneke — den en ten — Got it! Thanks! (Oops, must review already. Just discovered I haven’t really absorbed “hebben” in the present tense after all. Back to some review, then.) I will be looking again for books and audio, and may order a printed book, rather than another ebook. I can tell there are things with Dutch pronunciation I need to understand in the phonetic sense, in order to get an accent going that sounds Dutch instead of English, German, or French. (Wow, you folks use [x] (Dutch ch, g) a lot. I will have to get used to it next to certain consonants.)
Side Note: Hahah, checking just a few videos about the Netherlands or in Dutch has turned up some, ah, odd to questionable to laughable to curious to interesting videos. Everything from weird touristy opinions to kids doing goofy challenges to actual historical, arts, or other interests. And I’m getting the impression that a very high percentage of Dutch people are blonds. LOL. — All of which, you know, is probably about as accurate as whatever impression a European viewer would get from random US people’s videos.
The other impression I’m getting is that spoken Dutch differs enough to be somewhat more difficult to understand, but written Dutch, if you squint real hard, is slightly easier for an English speaker to read, but still different enough to give one pause. On the other hand, the differences and the things I can see similar, going on linguistically, are really interesting. — I would love to know how Dutch arrived at its own take on spelling its vowels, way back when. It’s more systematic and consistent than English, but there are things going on there that are, to an English speaker, even acquainted with French and a little bit of German, that are oddly, uniquely Dutch-flavored. (That one “textbook” still does not cover pronunciation enough, either for an everyman speaker or someone who knows about phonetics.) I get the impression that Dutch had a larger set of vowels and vowel-pairs (diphthongs) but those reduced down between the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modern day. First impression: Just about every vowel-pair spelling has its own single vowel or diphthong in Dutch. Double vowels are long, but others can be single vowels in short or long, or they’re diphthongs of one kind or another, and then those historical, older vowels have simplified down.
@BCS, I think you’re right about the vowels and diphtongs. They are pronounced more consistently than in English, except where they are part of a loan-word where they will be pronounced (more or less) the way they are in the language the word is borrowed from.
There are two pairs of diphtongs that are written differently but sound the same nowadays; historically they apparently had slightly different sounds: EI = IJ and AU = OU (which sounds like the ow in now).
I’ve found you a good book on Dutch grammar, in English. If you can mail me your new address or PObox, I’ll send it to you (my email address is unchanged). The American Book Center in Amsterdam had about six different Dutch grammar books in English, but they thought this one would probably be most useful for you. I can add a little green book i.e. wordlist of the correct spelling, which contains the phonetic sounds for all the Dutch words (and nothing else), or maybe a dictionary if you prefer.
Blonds: yes, lots, but among adults I don’t think it’s a full majority, unless you count all the lighter browns as blonds too. Many kids start out blond and then gradually go brown somewhere in high school.
HEBBEN (to have)
Ik heb (short è)
Jij hebt / heb jij?
Hij/zij/het heeft (long ee, pronounced like the A in English ABC)
Wij hebben
Jullie hebben
Zij hebben
Ik had (I had, short à)
Jij had/had jij?
Hij had
Wij/Jullie/Zij hadden
There is a rule about which final consonants get an extra -t instead of a -d on the end in the pluperfect(?) “I have worked” = “ik heb gewerkt” and “I have walked” = “ik heb gewandeld”, which kids learn as a single word, either ‘t KOFSCHIP or ‘t FOKSCHAAP (the vowels don’t matter, as long as you can make one word out of the consonants, so a ship or a sheep works just as well) – it has no bearing on the -t on the end of the second person singular present tense.
And yes, (northern) Dutch is a very guttural-sounding language, not very musical at all. If it gives you a sore throat, you could try the softer southern pronunciation and make people think you’re from Belgium 😉
Especially in names, but also in several fossilised sayings, Dutch still retains the (declensions or inflections?) of “the” it once had, and that German still retains in der-des-dem-den and die-der-der-die (IIRC my 40 year old German lessons), hence names like Den Haag (the hedge = the city where our national government is located), Ten Boom (= te den boom, at the tree), Van der Laan (“from the lane”), and ‘s Hertogenbosch = des Hertogen bosch (the Duke’s wood, with the silent final ch after a final -s, that has been removed from Dutch spelling a century ago: modern spelling would be Hertog’s bos, but instead it was “modernised” long ago to Den Bosch (-ch is silent), analogue to ‘s Gravenhage (the Count’s hedge) being turned into Den Haag. Tricky, that, as both forms are still in use, but the respective cities use ‘s Hertogenbosch and Den Haag officially).
So any stray -r, -s, -n on such words as DE and TE can be ignored for the purpose of figuring out the meaning; you can use your German gramnar sense to recognise those.
As you see in the city names, “des” (belonging to the) often gets shortened to ‘s in front of a word. You still see that in ordinary language too, in fossilised constructions like “in the morning” = ‘s ochtends / ‘s morgens, in the afternoon = ‘s middags, in the evening = ‘s avonds; those words have also retained their final -s in that construction to be congruent with the ‘s, like in German. The words themselves do not end on -s, and the plural ends on -en: AVOND, AVONDEN; MIDDAG, MIDDAGEN (mid-da-gen, so the vowel a changes from short to long); OCHTEND, OCHTENDEN; MORGEN, MORGENS (-en is never used for the plural of a word which already ends on -en in the singular, the -s is always used for those plurals).
😀 Cognates everywhere! — I’m just now checking back with the blog. I’ll email you shortly. With the time difference, I think it’s now about 3pm over there, so no telling when you’ll be able to get to it. — I’d prefer the green wordlist book with phonetics. I’ll see about a Dutch-English bilingual dictionary here. (Collins or Larousse are the likely publishers here.) — Wow, thank you very much!
I’ve read that “sch” in Dutch is just “s” (ss) plus “ch” (that strong hh sound English used to have in the same places), and (“ss” + “hh”), I am so used to “sch” being “sh” as in English, “ch” as in French, that I am really going to have to unlearn this one for Dutch. And so far, G as the same ch sound is really throwing me. I ~think~ maybe I’m hearing it more now in the spoken samples, such as on YouTube clips, but so far, hmm, that one’s tough to unlearn or train myself for also.
The declension on “de” (the) makes some odd sense. I’ll get the forms with some more practice. (Your recall of German grammar is probably better than my 12 weeks in 7th grade plus occasional other reading, haha.) We didn’t have any formal training in Middle English or Old English in my English Lit. survey courses, but we did zoom through a good deal of Middle English and Chaucer in the original, with notes, thanks to a good professor. I did some additional reading, due to language interest, over the years, so I have a little idea of how English used to match up with other Germanic languages.
Ah, verbs get a conjugation. For nearly everything else, it’s a declension for nouns, pronouns, adjectives, including “the” and “a/an/some.”
Schip for ship, schaap for sheep, I can recall easily, if I’ll remember the vowel for Dutch sheep, lol. Except that -t KOFSCHIP immediately had me thinking, “Kkkt-T, KIF S[C]HIP!” instead, haha! (Just by reading it here on the blog.)
That bit with dropping “des,” clipping it to ‘s, before the noun sure is interesting from a conlang and linguistics viewpoint. So ‘t does this too in “te,” (at), which looks like a schwa unstressed “to” in English as “t’ or ta” in spelling casual or dialectal speech: (I’m goin’ t’ the store; I’ve gotta get the heck outta Dodge.) 😀
I’d expect CJ is finding this interesting too. 🙂 — Hanneke, thanks again!
I appreciated this guy’s insights (though I think he’s a bit hard on the UK, nobody does auto-centric planning like North Americans), and would add a couple more. By the simple device of getting on the wrong train, I got a short tour of the countryside east of Amderdam and was delighted by all the little green fields. No fences; they were all divided by substantial ditches/mini canals, and it made for a very picturesque view.
On the other hand, graffiti in the Netherlands seems to be omni-present and butt ugly. No concession to street art. (In my part of the world if you don’t want your wall tagged, you get somebody to paint a mural on it. Even in little twerp circles it is very bad form to tag a mural) This seems very strange as the Dutch seem to have a very well developed design esthetic. If they have some junk, they build a shed for it and it’s not just thrown up willy-nilly. You may not like the result but it is clear that thought went into it. It has style. Are unimaginative tags just some serious anti-social statement, or perhaps this is just a feature of the Amsterdam area?
My bad. Yes, coquis are tree frogs. I’m not from Puerto Rico and I’m still learning everything. :-/
CJ: What kind of counter tops are you getting and how long will it take for them to arrive after your cabinets get there? [If I remember the process, cabinets must be in place before the counter tops can be measured properly.]
We’re splurging and getting granite, a black granite with copper flecks in it that looks like stars…we should have our heads examined. But we’ve been saving for this for ten years.
One of the main things in what we’re doing is STORAGE, including building a broom and equipment closet in the kitchen. We have a full basement, but in the last 17 years we’ve moved three times, and not really sorted-out the way we need to. Jane says ‘garage sale’ and I just wince, but we do have a lot of ‘stuff’ that’s too good to toss. The basement needs a serious purge, and the kitchen needs to be able to store things like the sweeper, and brooms, and crockpot and mixer and so on. Right now, things just get shoved here and there in desperation. When I’m through, the only things going back in that kitchen will have a place and be in it.