Dutch=Duutsch=Deutsch=Doitsch=... They all mean the same thing - german. With the understanding that german means continental west germanic (yea I dont know about friesians). The people of the Nederlands are nederlanders.
I remember back in the late 80s when i was a young boy i was playing computer games on my DOS pc. And as a german i wanted to play them in german. But i was not aware that "deutsch" is "german" in those menus where you chose your language. So i looked and only found "dutch" and thought "close enough". and that is why i am decent at reading dutch today but not able to speak it.
In my school library there were very old soviet-time books in Ukrainian. I enjoyed reading some of them but back then I didn't know that they were written in the whole particular language, I just thought that it was some rural style of Russian.
@@alLEDP no. Maybe essentially the same meaning, but different origin. Volk (and its English cognate "folk") derives from the same PIE root as "voll" (English "full", also a cognate) and "viele" ("many" in English, which doesn't appear to be a cognate)
I am Pennsylvania Dutch. My Dad spoke Pennsylvania Dutch and when he went to Germany they could basically understand him but they said he spoke "slang " to their ears...
But more accurately you're Pennsylvania "Deutsche," or German. My American family was really Dutch--real Dutch. They came from Amsterdam and Haarlem in the Netherlands.
Your father is lucky he went to the right parts of Germany. PA Dutch is very similar to Palatinate German, in Palatinate the locals should understand him, except perhaps for occasional Anglicisms and some expressions that PA Dutch kept but sound antiquated in modern "Pfälzisch" / Palatinate German. In north or east Germany, people would struggle much more understanding PA Dutch.
@@nickmoser7785 They were German Reform. Not every PA Dutch is Amish or Mennonite. Some came as tradesmen. My family came in the late 1700's and settled in Berks County.
First time on your channel. As an American Black man with a lot of Irish ancestry, born during WW2 (yes, I'm really old), all of this was quite new to me. I found it fascinating, instructive and enjoyable. History being my favorite subject probably has something to do with it. Subbed.
@@mikespearwood3914 Oh because there were so many Irish serfs? I heard they were of really low class back then no? So they mingled with blacks? I know its not cool and all but you gotta love these stories.
@@mrfrano100 According to my Dutch teacher when i was at school 32 years ago whenever i was sober i did not speak Dutch and whenever i was drunk i did not speak Dutch even more. But that's because he and i had a huge disagreement on which form of Dutch is Dutch and which not. He could only win that disagreement on paper but i still do in reallity. Since then more and more dialects he did not call Dutch are now official Dutch langauges and what he has been teaching is still a made up version that everybody must learn but nobody except for Dutch teachers actaully speak. And my version is today seen as that of the region that had the least changes in the past 1000 years so i speak Dutch these days and Dutch teachers teach science fiction!!. Therefor with 3 beers your Dutch is no worse than that of my teacher or mine depending on your point of view and i give a 10 out of 10 for even trying and a bonus point if done drunk.
@@eldariskenderfranke4284 Um that's misleading. It's rather, that's derived of the word the Germans had for themselves. Including the original Longobards that settled in northern italy.
Common misunderstanding in America with the Pennsylvania Dutch, whose language and culture has not to do with the Netherlands but rather with a large number of people of German ancestry that settled in that part of the U.S. and consequently have German names, and words in their... Deutsch(en) Kultur...und Sprache!...Thanks for the video, most interesting and informative...
@@koloblicin not sure one needs to declense a German word when using it in an English text. Nominative ("deutsche Kultur") should be fine in this context. After all, the genitive of "Jesus Christus" being "Jesu Christi" aside, we don't declense Latin nouns in German either.
Years back I found out that I can converse with a guy in Lübeck with just moderate difficulty. Then, later on I tried to converse with people in Ulm and found it next to impossible. Even Low and High German have huge differences. Oh, I don't know German (except a few words) but I know Swedish.
Languages aren't a singular block, at least until modern education / media with the standardisation of languages. Language was closer tied to region than modern nation state, the dialect spoken by the Upper / Ruling Class typically got designated the proper language and everything else a dialect. The dialects across a border in modern times can still be mutually intelligible.
@@explosivo666 Equally often the proper language was made artificially by intelectuals writing in a way where everyone in their nation would understand them.
Try speaking to someone who speaks Swiss German; they will understand you, but you won't understand them. My German pronunciation is [I've been told] pretty good for an English speaker, but while I couldn't understand a word of what a Schwabisch speaker said, I was understood by them.
@@JMM33RanMA The alemans also know the standart language. Its like scots understand you fully, you understand them partially. Because they know standart english and you dont know scots.
As a Dane living in Scotland, I have - when speaking to people in English - often been confused with both being German and Dutch. When I say I am Danish, some people will say that they have been to Amsterdam, other people will just assume that I am German or Dutch from the accent on my English. Even though the word Danish Dutch and Deutsch might not be related then it seems like there are similarities. To my knowledge, the Norwegians are Swedes, do not encounter these wild accusations😊
When Danish comes to my ears it sounds a lot like Low German dialects in the first seconds. Then I try to understand what people say, understand almost nothing and it becomes clear I'm listening to Danish instead. I am from Bavaria by the way. You are right that Swedish and Norwegian (Bokmål) have a more distinct North Germanic feeling than Danish which sounds much more mumbled to German ears. I also noticed that Danish speakers when speaking German appear to have much less accent than speakers of other Germanic languages. So Danish really can sound similar to German. Nevertheless I wouldn't be able to pronounce: Rødgrød med fløde. 😅
@Andreas Juul Mikkelsen. I watch Scotland History Tours channel and often comment along the lines of Hilbert's Geordie video, that southern Scots are more Angles than folk in Yorkshire, as a bit of a wind up to those who seem to hate anything south of the border. I always liked Scotland and my childhood hero from literature was Alan Breck Stewart. Another viewer, who also watches similar channels to me recently referred to me as the King of Danelaw in a reply elsewhere. I had recommended this channel to him for Viking content. Tell those Scots confused about where you are from that if it were not for the Danes they would be Alba and not Scotland. A recent video for Burns Night in Scots reminded me of words "nächtliche Schatten" from a German song, though as I commented, this was not what Tam in the poem did when he saw witches, but shadows in the night.
@@dirkbimini5963 Agree :-) and yes. Rødgrød med Fløde is hard. My Scottish partner still haven’t mastered “Røget ål” when ordering smoked eel for lunch. Another tung twister.
Hi Hilbert, I remember a situation from decades ago. As a student originating from South of Netherlands I worked mid 1970 an internship at LHB in Salzgitter-Watenstedt. On the work floor the workmen spoke Plattdeutsch and they never thought I would understand them. But in general I could understand then quite nicely. One day I kindly declined a sandwich with a lot of garlic. And the guy said "Wah a boer nie kent, da vreet ie nie" and guess what (I know, you don't have to guess). That is a saying that we literally use in the South of the Netherlands. Hard to understand how those similarities in languages were kept through history! Greetings JB
It's likely due to tribalism, there are various ways to specify what group are in front of that person (typically before nations it was city-states, then before that it would've been skin color (it still is used unfortunately with some people), ie: ”hello [other(s)]")
might also mean people/descendants of Tuisto it's pretty close if you speak it and well in the dialectical range even if we don't assume an ancient typo
There's also the opposite reaction: there are those other people whose languages we can't understand. The Anglosaxons who conquered Britain in the 5th century called the Celtic people Welshmen and their country Wales. Welsh and Wales are derived from the Germanic word Walhaz which means foreigner. This is also how Wallonia got its name, that name was given to the Latin/French speaking population of modern day Wallonia by the Germanic tribes living in the Netherlands and Germany.
My maternal grandparents, both 1st generation American of German parents, called all German speakers "Dutchmen". They grew up in Queens NY in the erly 1900's.
@@brokkrep nor only that if they comes from the nort and or west from Germany than they would speak more a german trying to speak dutch dialect and it could also just be bc our countries are so similar in language and culture and dutch is pretty much german with an dialect german is dutch with an dialect...
I think it's also worth mentioning that dutch and low German were once very similar especially during the hanse, it's only later on that they divate much more, especially with high German being now the norm.
Even into the 18th century Dutch plays were performed in Hamburg without needing translation. During the 16/17th century about a quarter to a third of the sailors were from 'Germany' and from the court cases it's often clear they did not need translators, which were present when f.e. French or High German speakers were on trial. Interestingly enough, during the Hanze times, Dutch and Low German were even mutually intelligible with Swedish. It isn't until the 16th century when evidence starts showing up that the languages are no longer mutually intelligible enough to communicate without translation.
I mean, it’s still quite similar. I’m from Hannover in Germany and we speak standard German / Hochdeutsch with a little bit of low German depending on ancestry. I don’t usually have problems understanding written Dutch. There a few words that are drastically different to German but most are just written a bit different. The bigger problem is understanding spoken Dutch since the consonant’s aren’t as hard and it overall just sounds like mumbling to Germans. Because of this it is a famous joke in Germany that Dutch is drunk german.
I found it quite interesting being a Portuguese who was brought up in The Netherlands learning that I could read easily complex books written in the Dutch language, because of the influence of latin I have from Portuguese. Knowing Dutch and Portuguese has given me bigger understanding of the languages and the influence dutch has from latin like Portuguese has from Arabic. Language is astonishing and intra cultural mix this has on us is gratifying.
I find this absolutely fascinating, how languages ended up separating from each other and how other languages influenced the development of another. Language is so complex and interesting
to me somehow the dutch people are like a brothers and sisters . they are so nice and almost everyone speaks german. i always fell very welcomed and am actually kind of ashamed i don't speak dutch. plus dutch rap sounds incredible, because it has that "mix" of german and english, it just sounds so cool.
It may interest you that Defoe still speaks of "High Dutch" in his novels when he is referring to the German language. Also, please be aware that "Platt" is actually used in a wider area than that where Low German is (or rather was) spoken, i.e. also along the Middle Rhine and in northern Hesse. It rather means "everyday vernacular", as opposed to the language used by priests, teachers and public officials (usually High German).
I am originally from near Heerlen in Limburg, the Netherlands close to the German border. We refer to our dialect as 'plat'. Not plat dutch or german though. Just 'plat'.
@@berndohm Sure, but in the Netherlands "plat" (noun) is used for the more rural dialects (Heerlen is old, but only started to grow into a "stad" starting in the 20 years before WW I).
@@ThW5 Sorry for not being clear enough. Same thing here, it's also used for the rural dialects, not for the language spoken in Bremen itself. I don't think anyone in the city still speaks Low German, and even the rural dialects in the surrounding countryside are slowly dying out. I once had a Dutch friend visiting and showed him around Bremen, he was amazed at the old Middle Low German inscriptions on buildings and thought it was some kind of Dutch.
It’s also interesting to note that Plattdüütsch is a "newer" term. Back in Hanse times people just called their language düdesch - usually in contrast to Latin (however, in Low German/Low Saxon, the sch was most times still pronounced as sk, like it’s still today in Westphalian Low Saxon) - or sassesch or sassesche sprake (meaning Saxon language) to distinguish it from other languages, especially like High German (oaverlendisch, oberländisch) and Dutch.
When you investigate.....you will see The Netherlands is still a German provence. Never been else since 1940. So....The Netherlands isn't a country at all.
Thank you for the insightful video. Just a small correction: The North German Confederation was founded in 1866. In 1864 Austria and Prussia were at war with Denmark over the Duchy of Schleswig. By the way: the conditions for the territorial shape of today's Netherlands were created by the Habsburgs Maximilian and Charles V, who conquered the east and north of today's Netherlands in numerous wars against France, Friesland, Geldern and Kleve. Geldern was not conquered until 1543. The borders of the countries were not language borders at this time. East and west of the borders, the inhabitants spoke pretty much the same dialects (Frisian, Old Saxon or Lower Saxon and Lower Franconian or Lower Rhine). Standard Dutch and Standard German were just beginning to develop
Hello Hilbert. This was interesting as it was always one of those things that you only sort of know, if like me you learned German in school. This led to me being asked in Germany if I was Holländer, as it was not expected that someone from England would speak German. The restaurant owners we befriended in Spain were from Netherlands, though one was from right on the German border, which used to be not so formal as you said, so we joked he was Dutch Deutsch, since his German was like a German. Funnily my girlfriend's Austrian relatives recently said the same about my German, though I reckon there was an Austrian joke in there somewhere. To try to pick up some Dutch, I used to watch RTL4 on the old Astra satellite, when my company headquarters at the time were in Rotterdam, though when I went their English was excellent. Despite being able to play "Wheel of Fortune" in Dutch, from my English and German, the accent defeated me. All I remember is "Straks bij RTL4, Goede Tijden Slechte Tijden".
My Grandmother was German (Hessisch) - I have always spoken German, and I have spent quite a lot of time in Germany over the years. Like you, I have often been taken for a Dutchman, which I assumed was down to my accent.
@@rodjones117 As I replied to another comment, I do have ancestors from Holland - the one in Lincolnshire. I always assumed my Yorkshire dialect helped with German, but I just had someone replying on another video comments, having said that I can think in French, but my accent is reminiscent of a character in "Ripping Yarns" episode "Eric Olthwaite", which is very funny if you have not seen it.
@@alansmithee8831 I can't really see why a Yorkshire accent would particularly help you with speaking German. To me, the hardest sound to master is the German "r", and I don't think Yorkshire helps with that. In fact, possibly, my rhotic West Country accent might help more.
@@rodjones117 It was just that I had no problem being understood. Perhaps the Germans I met had more patience? I have mostly been in Paris, when in France, with everyone always busy.
In some Eastern region of the Netherlands the dialects that are or were spoken there are actually Low German (Niederdeutsch) and not Low Franconian which is Dutch! In other north-eastern regions of the Netherlands Frisian, a language of its own, is spoken, not Dutch. See "Dutch dialects" at Wikipedia.
I always thought, it simply was because the dutch once probably were considered basically the same as the Germans so dutch was the original English word for dutch/germans but due to dutch and german splitting and Latin influence in English, dutch stuck with the Netherlands and Belgium and Germany/German was simply called german because it derived from Latin word of Germania.
No doubt "thiudiskaz" is also the source for "tedesco," the Italian word for "German." Another example of the d- to th- shift is that "dorff" and "doorp" are the German and Dutch words for "village," while the suffix "-thorp" appears in many English place names.
Perfect timing mate, I just started learning Low German and found out about the "Aldietse beweging", a Dutch movement to unite all Low German areas where they refer to themselves as "A Low German people", wich really fascinates me. So I am very interested in this topic at the moment.👍
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 Well, while low german is derived from old saxon and there is a state in Germany called lower saxony (wich is the origin of the language), "Saxon" today in Germany refers to people from the state of Saxony (i.e. Upper Saxony), wich is not low german.
@@MonsieurWeevil Rejected! There is Saxony and Upper Saxony. And I will speak this way forever and if the saxons where to also speak this way it would eventually be accepted, because its true.
Complimenten voor deze zeer informatieve video! Ik wist al redelijk wat, maar je hebt me echt nog wel wat geleerd. Dank je wel voor het delen van deze video!
Wow this video came at the perfect time for me! I told my friend that I'm learning both Dutch and German right now and he asked me yesterday why the word Dutch is so similar to Deutsch. I didn't really know and just said "Eh, the English probably got confused at some point and thought everyone in that area was the same." I suppose that's not entirely incorrect, but I had no idea there was so much to the story! Bedankt, mijn Vriend!
IIRC, Hilbert treated the actual meaning change in English rather cursorily, possibly because what I think I know about it isn't actually certain. But for what it's worth, here it is: The split between German and English occurred around the time of the reformation, when the Gutenberg press had made books so affordable that even peasants read religious treatises like mad because they felt that they would end up in hell if they didn't make the right choice. The printers in Holland decided to translate the books from Germany rather than reprint them unchanged. This caused the linguistic split. At any other time in history, English speakers probably had at least as much contact to Germans as to Netherlanders, so they might well have started to refer to Dutch as Hollandish and continued to refer to German as Dutch. However, at that time there were a lot of engineers from Holland in England, reclaiming huge amounts of land from the sea. These had always been called Dutch, and it was natural to continue to refer to them as Dutch. Which is why a different word was needed for 'the other Dutch from slightly further away'. To solve this problem, some English scholar resorted to using the overly broad Latin term "Germanic", in the shorter form "German".
As being from the south east of the Netherlands, where we speak dialect, which is very similar to most of the German dialects, it was an interesting explanation. Especially about the pennsylvanian Dutch, which they connected directly to the Dutch in the series Friends, where "Monica" spoke broken Dutch. I also lived in the north of Germany, where I could use my dialect with the Germans who also were able to speak in dialect, which was a shocking experience for most of the other Germans.
Great video! But in the sound mixing I think it would be better to have the music be a little bit less loud compared to your voice. Especially, the music that kicked in as you started the bit on the Pennsylvania Dutch was comparatively loud. Verder een super goede video! Mooi gedaan!
I'm from sweden, before we was united the parts that is in central sweden was called Svidtjod, where tjod is a form of the word deutsh/dütsch and svid meaning "swede"so basicly the swedish people's land.
@Freibursche Svidtjod or Svitjod was used until a few hundred years ago, from ON Svíþjóð, and the "Sví" part (which is where Swede is from) ultimately goes back to Proto-Germanic (reconstructed) "swihô" (from, probably, "*swe-"), which, unexpectedly, is assumed to mean "our people".
"Nederduits" reflects the ancient concept of a "duits" identity (Deutsche) in the variants of the people from the ancient "Niederlande" (the lower countries like Burgundy, Brabant, Holland, Limburg, Gelderland, Lower Rhine, Westphalia etc.).
Thanks Hilbert, i did not think their languages were so closely related , .. I see the Dutch King and Queen and the Princess of Orange are visiting their territories in the Caribbean ... 👍👍
Records from 1832 refer to one of my ancesters as a "German Dutchman". This was in Tennessee, USA. So it seems that at that time, "Dutch" was a generic term in the USA, and it had to be modified with "German" in order to specify which precise type of "Dutch".
I live in a neighborhood called Deutschtown because it was founded by Germans in the early 1800s. Over time the name degraded to Dutchtown even tho the Dutch have no connection. Eventually the official signage and such was recognized as Deutschtown
@Hilbert Could you make a clip how the Ommelanden and East Frisia stopped speaking Frisian and started to use low Saxon in the beginning of 15th century . It seems that happened quite quickly within one generation. What was the reason for this change. Hanseatic influence and its lingua Franca low Saxon/German? The Hanseatic city Groningen was always low-Saxon speaking.
Very interesting!Never too old to learn something new.I am Dutch and grew up in part of the world that was a Dutch kolonie.My parents had many German friends who spoke Dutch with an accent. Most of them were retired from the military or law enforcement.My father always told me "that are our cousins to the east".Even to this day when watching competition in a sports event between someone from Germany and another nation, I am always hoping for my cousins to get the upper hand.
Thanks to two very good German language teachers (who were also very strict, 1980-kind…), I was well “schooled” in the linguistics of the relevant north-western regions (south and east, not so much). However, they didn’t really provide a good historical narrative, so dank u wel for making my insights less patchy! Greetings from 🇳🇴…
“There are only two things I can't stand in this world: People who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch.” Nigel Powers (from Austin Powers)
prior to the unification of the german states dutch was the name for anybody speaking a ( later called ) german langurage in english so in fact deutsch and dutch mean pretty much the same
I learned in high school in the Netherlands that "Diets" referred to the language from around the 13th century from which the Dutch and German languages originated.
I have often heard about this distinction between duits and diets, but (as a German speaker who hasn't learned much Dutch) wonder whether these were already separate words when the split of the Dutch-German language continuum occurred (around the time of the reformation, when people started reading like mad and printers in Holland decided to translate rather than just reprint), or whether people have since adopted two different regional forms of the same word because the meaning of the word split.
I grew up in southern Ontario in Canada, specifically in Waterloo Region, roughly an hour's drive west of Toronto. Our local area only really began getting settled by Europeans in the 1830s. Some of the earliest and most influential settlers are widely known today as the Pennsylvania Dutch, but were actually Germans that chose to come to pre-Confederation Canada after initially living in Pennsylvania. They should, of course, be known as Pennsylvania Deutsch but the average person still refers to them as Pennsylvania Dutch (or at least they did when I was a child in the 1960s). We still have clusters of old-order Mennonites and Amish in the rural areas and driving around a horse and buggy is not remotely unusual in the rural areas. They still speak their dialects of German at home and you sometimes hear it in the smaller towns, particularly at farmers' markets.
But Dutch is indeed the correct term to use in this case, not Deutsch. The people refer themselves as Dutch. This also confused me for a moment when I was younger, and dated a girl in Pennsylvania who said she was Dutch. But as the video explains, this is the historic usage of the word.
Mom was from Germany (Speaking High German), Pop was from Netherlands speaking Dutch (and several others too). I am first Generation American. I have Mennonite neighbors. I can speak German, and understand a lot of Dutch. When my neighbors and I tested out our German skills we all ended up laughing. It all sounded familiar but the meanings and pronunciations were completely different. Their family history was from Bavaria a hundred or more years ago, So, we all concluded the language had changed too much for us to communicate. Thanks, this is very interesting information to me personally.
Was born between Hanover and Brunswick and raised on a small village. So I understand Plattdeutsch. Later I learned English. And then I had a job in the accounting were I had to read letters from the belastingdienst of Netherlands (hope I wrote it correct, 10 years past). I always wondered about the differences between Dutch and deutsch. But I saw so many parallels, especially in writing. So thank you for this interesting video. Seems so logic now :)
If you apply a few sound shifts, even English will turn into Dutch. Most basic words are identical and a lot of import has been imported to Dutch as well.
More than one hundred and fifty years ago, people called German and Dutch _High Dutch_ and _Low Dutch_ in English respectively. These old-fashioned English terms can be found in Jonathan Swift's novel "Gulliver's Travels" (1726).
The greatest part of being British but speaking good German is that when I visit the Netherlands my brain is tricking me into thinking I understand what I am hearing and reading, but then my head just explodes. I imagine that this is what a small stroke feels like.
En as du in stää vun dat Angelsassies nu op dat leern vun Neddersassies richten schall, en du di eyn lüttel bettken rond üm de Nedderlansche spraoke herom leert… schall dat eyn moment geevm dat iej bi naoh alles verstaon könnt. Eyn moment dat du seen schall häbbm dat dat Knief en the knive, nich so anners bünt as ie denket. Dat ‘ick hävv daon’ en ‘I have done’ up mekaor lieket, keyn ‘ge’ stähet daorvör. That the old nethersaxon also uses the verb ‘to have’ a lot more often. Yes, it is ‘ick hävv west’. And not ‘ick bün west’. If you learn Plattdüütsch you will not only learn about English, but also more about Dutch. If German and English were to be cousins of the Dutch language, Nethersaxon and Dutch could be seen as twins having their beautymarks in different places.
This was fun for me, as it made me remember my grandparents (father's side) both were first generation in US, grandpa was German and gramma was Dutch, I remember their stories of their parents (and gramma little wooden shoes) I also remember the differences you mentioned here and learning this as a child by my them
2:53 it's interesting, Frisian is sort of in the middle where we have dropped the Þ, but we haven't replaced it all with a D but often a softer T: "Ik tocht dat de tinne dief de dikke toarn tankte". Written down it doesn't look like it, but when you say this sentence out loud you wouldn't use a hard D sound at 'Dief' en 'Dikke'
@@telebubba5527 Frisians are the unspoken 4th tribe of the Anglo-Saxons. They settled England in almost as great a number as the Jutes, but were dispersed among different kingdoms. All of those people were of the Ingving (Ingvaeonic) branch of the ancient Germanics, the so-called "North Sea Germanics".
@@Burgermeister1836 Indeed. I know all that. In fact many Saxons were basically Friesians, but for some reason, probably subjugation, were dealt with the name of their enemy.
Some Specifications: Truth is that before the Thirty Years War the Dutch, the Germans (including Austrians obviously) and the Swiss were the same people. In Ancient latin term 'Germania' was also applied to the Netherlands. Also before the Statenvertaling by Jacob van Liesvelt, the protestants of the Netherlands used Martin Luther translation. Sometimes in the Middle Ages the English call the germans in Middle English 'alemand', term borrowed from Middle French.
1:28 "fieldish" meaning "native"? It's interesting because the word "polish" (polski) in old polish meant "fieldish", "from field" from "pole" meaning "a field".
Shows how Nations are artificially constructed sometimes, some German dialects cant understand each other even though they are the "same' language, yet Norwegians and Swedes can yet they are considered seperate
Dutch=Duutsch=Deutsch=Doitsch=... They all mean the same thing - german. With the understanding that german means continental west germanic (yea I dont know about friesians). The people of the Nederlands are nederlanders.
7:25 Oh be careful, I wouldn't call the dialect that Luther spoke as "East Franconian", as that's very specific to the area in northern bavaria. Greetings from a Franconian guy.
This was the first time I've heard that Luther supposingly spoke "East Franconian". I 've never came across such a statement before. I don't even have an idea where such information could come from. I doubt, that it is totally clear how Martin Luther actually spoke: in the 15th and 16th century there where no methods to record speech. Considering where he grew up his local vernacular must have been influenced by the central German Thuringian dialect and the Low German Eastphalian idiom. When he started to translate the Bible he tried to combine central and southern German words and methods of writing and spellings forms with the aim that people in a larger area could understand his translations. But if he naturally spoke like the written hybrid language he created is not clear in my regards.
Interesting is that the name Dietrich means leader of the people. Diet, as in the old adjective Dietsch, just means something like the nation. Before the Netherlands were a state people from the current Dutch speaking region called themselves Dietsch, meaning members of the nation or 'het volk'. Dietsch became Dutch.
Which is why the Japanese parliament has been given the name "Diet" in the English translation. There was a Prussian/German influence around 1890 when the parliament was created.
Proto-germanic *þeudō meaning "people" was also borrowed into Proto-slavic as *tjudjь, but it underwent semantic change and today in all Slavic languages means "foreign, someone else’s" - Polish "cudzy", Russian "čužój" , Serbo-Croat "t ud".
My oldest known ancestor came to the Netherlands around 1800 (or just before) from what is now Germany (the west of Nordrhein-Westfalen). At that time, the languages were still easily interchangeable. It was more dialects that differed. So he could easily make himself understood. My mother-in-law was born and raised in Enschede. Near the border with Germany. I remember well that when a German acquaintance called, she switched to German so easily. And she also spoke "Plattdeutsch" fluently.
I think one should also mention that several other words have the same root as well. I think in particular of "zu bedeute", German for "to mean", and the derivation "bedeutung", "meaning". German also has the verb "zu deute" for "to interpret", and finally "deutlich", which means "clearly". In my native Norwegian, "Germany" is "Tyskland", the German language and any person or thing from there is called "tysk" while "bedeutung" is "betydning", and these also have the same root. We also have the verb "å tyde", meaning "to interpret/discern" (as in being able to discern some barely legible writing or a bad audio recording of someone speaking; possibly could also be used to refer to breaking some code; probably also used to refer to interpreting someone's astrology situation, I wouldn't know). Lastly, we have "tydelig", a direct analogue of "deutlich" with the same meaning. I believe all of this relates back to a meaning of making something understandable to people.
Yes, of course, nearly worlds have the same root, if all the languages have a common "grandmother tongue" 2.000 years ago. Btw the infinitive of a german word is just without "zu", no "att gå" or "to go", just "gehen", but with a -en in the end.
@@slimytoad1447 Your guess is as good as mine. I would like to correct one thing in what I wrote originally. The word for nationals of Germany (as in "Angela Merkel is a German") in my language is "tysker": "Angela Merkel er en tysker." But also, she is German (adjective): "Angela Merkel er tysk." Not that it changes anything.
Hey, in Dutch we have the word "duidelijk" which means "clear, understandable" and "duiden" which means "to elaborate, clear up". Maybe it's also connected to "Duits"?
But that is modern nomenclature. The Netherlands ("Low Countries") were part of the German Empire until the late 1500's. Dutch is not that far away from Low German, especially the late medieval and early Renaissance versions.
When the Amish in the US tell you they speak Dutch they actually mean they speak Deutsch but they really did not want to be persecuted during WW1 and WW2 as they do not participate in wars anyhow.
Wow, I like how the Netherlands has a region where many can speak Dutch, Deutsch and English. Even though there were so many problems in the past, especially the second World War, it's so nice how the relationship between us is so good again. I'm currently learning how to speak Dutch and I see soo many similar words. All in all a very good video. Please make more of them.
People joke in the netherlands about how were stil angry at germany but not because of the war but because they beat us in the world cup final in 1974. I think its nice to see how friendly german and dutch people with each other now.
Back in high school I worked at the Magic Kingdom and it was right around the time of the Berlin wall coming down. I took German in high school since I had wanted to work for Mercedes in Stuttgart. I passed an oral test to get a pin that said "Ich spreche Deutsch" and was looking forward to practicing my second language. While a few German speakers noticed it and spoke German with me the vast number of inquiries I got were from Americans in shock that I spoke Dutch! I cannot tell you how many times I figuratively rolled my eyes and said, "No, I speak Deutsch, German".
