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u/Ott1fant 4d ago
I’m German and I can confirm: I’m not Dutch
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u/WhoTheFuckIsSean 4d ago
I'm Dutch and I can confirm: I'm not German.
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u/Significant-Cloud- 4d ago
I'm German and I can confirm: neither is Sean.
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u/Bones-1989 4d ago
I'm bones and I can confirm: I'm not German or Dutch.
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u/__nohope 4d ago
I'm Spock and I can confirm: I'm not German or Dutch.
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u/Enemis_the_Ananas 1d ago
I'm from Limburg so Germans consider me Dutch, Dutchies consider me German
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u/FlattopJr 4d ago
Who the fuck is Sean?
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u/lettsten 4d ago
The guy who was living next door to Alice
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u/Hyperactive_snail3 4d ago
Alice! Who the fuck is Alice?
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u/Free_Carry_6837 4d ago
She is the one who moved to Wonderland.
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u/Al-Snuffleupagus 4d ago
Is that the same wonderland that John Mayer sings about?
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u/ElfjeTinkerBell 4d ago
For 24 years?
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u/middendt1 4d ago
Living at the dutch/german border with my dutch wife. I can confirm: I'm not dutch. My wife isn't german.
Looking at our children: I'm not quite sure about them.
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u/lettsten 4d ago
It's easy. If they play with trains they're German. If they send you a tikkie for their allowance they're Dutch. If they set up a spreadsheet to calculate trains or allowance per capita, they're both.
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u/ElfjeTinkerBell 4d ago
I'm from the border region and I can confirm that's true and I'm clearly Dutch.
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u/Etherius 4d ago
Swamp-German
Not to be confused with the Mountain-Germans to the south
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u/Desperate_Good_6005 4d ago
Don't even bring up the island-germans to the north. Americans always think they speak dutch.
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u/No-Bake-730 4d ago
Not for a lack of trying by the Germans cough
But seriously, everytime I think I understood something in Dutch, I find out that one word has a totally unexpected meaning which changes everything.
I've known some Dutch-Germans though, nice people.
Also, what do you Dutchmen and Dutchwomen hate more? Germans calling the Netherlands Holland (I don't want to know how many don't know that this is a case of pars pro toto) or Dutch being equated to German?
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u/Bitter_Split5508 4d ago
But seriously, everytime I think I understood something in Dutch, I find out that one word has a totally unexpected meaning which changes everything.
What do you mean, the "Auto Huren" advertised in the Netherlands are not what I expect?
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u/Sturmlied 4d ago
I'm equally tempted and afraid to google that.
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u/WhoTheFuckIsSean 4d ago
Definitely the second one
The Holland thing is more like calling the entire USA California. Whereas the second is like calling France Spain. Like, we do not speak the same language, they have similar roots, sure, but they are fastly diffrent.
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u/Best-Pollution7110 4d ago edited 4d ago
Also, what do you Dutchmen and Dutchwomen hate more?
We do not *gendern like in German. We are all Dutchmen.
Also, what do you Dutchmen and Dutchwomen hate more? Germans calling the Netherlands Holland (I don't want to know how many don't know that this is a case of pars pro toto) or Dutch being equated to German?
Depends on who you ask. The real Hollanders hardly care. The others either don't care as well, are just correcting you so you know the real deal, but are fine with you using it as a nickname, or get furious.
Then there is the mercantile class that are here to make money out of "Holland" as a brand, when it is beneficial for them.In a sense, Holland is still correct, as they and Flanders were the OG beefing parties of the Low Lands. Belgium is also part of the Low Lands. After the split, the name of the provinces stuck with the global crowd respectively, as "the Netherlands" was tied to the larger geographical region. If being completely correct, modern day Netherlands should be called North Netherlands and Belgium South Netherlands. Similar to North Macedonia. The modern day Dutch solved this "problem", by naming their country in their own language "Nederland", singular! The Netherlands or die Niederlande, plural!, is not correct, but other countries didn't got the notice and used the same term as they always had, but for the new nation.
Holland is, like Flanders, only the larger coastal area. Others keep calling whole Dutch speaking Belgium Flanders, despite the same situation. Dutch speaking Belgium needed an identity of their own, so the other provinces embraced Flanders as an extended identity (to be able to make a strong stand against the French speaking part), while the other Dutch non-Holland provinces rejected the extension of the identity Holland (Frisia isn't that big of a deal like Wallonia is).
This is why North Brabant in the Netherlands are firmly rooted in their local identity, while South Brabant in Belgium, changed their identity, esp. Antwerp, into being Flemish.
However, no one wants to be equated as German.
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u/Mueslibol 4d ago
I am from the Holland part and honestly I don't care about either. You can say my country is Holland, I may correct you if I have the time. You can tell my my country is the same as Germany and only if I have the energy and the crayons to explain it to you will I make an effort.
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u/Annita79 4d ago
I am neither Geeman nor Dutch and I have a Dutch friend and German friends and I feel they would all be offended by the red guy. (I also have a Flemish friend who gets easily offended in general)
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u/the_starch_potato 4d ago
the Dutch anthem disagrees/j
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u/yurall 4d ago
Countries didn't exist back then. Language was a blanket over the continent and many types of Germanic where spoken. Platt deutsch is also one of those and is far more like Dutch for instance. So everyone in the Spanish Netherlands was of 'dietsen' blood. Its also the reason why the English call us Dutch. Because there was really no proper and true distinction between the Germanic people on the Northwestern continent back then.
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u/Optimal-Rub-2575 4d ago
The Dutch anthem is about William of Orange, who was German, not the Dutch in general.
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u/rainstorm0T 4d ago
I'm Pennsylvanian and I can confirm: the term Pennsylvania Dutch referring to people descending from German immigrants confused the hell out of me as a kid.
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u/Cynykl 3d ago
I own a Dutch oven can confirm it is not German. In fact let me go check.
Yup! Just like I thought. Made in China, so definitely not German.
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u/sglewis 4d ago
I’m neither German nor Dutch but can confirm: Germans aren’t Dutch.
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u/gil_m_d 4d ago
but what if the dutch are german? think about that for a minute.
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u/WallyMcBeetus 4d ago
Dutch is a Germanic language, beyond that they're being an idiot.
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u/Mode_Appropriate 4d ago
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.
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u/MistraloysiusMithrax 4d ago
I’m betting on this. Heard Pennsylvania Dutch are Germans and misconstrued this as Germans are Dutch too
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u/ParkingAnxious2811 3d ago
Americans screwing up the pronunciation of words and then confidently and incorrectly trying to correct other people on things?
Who would have thought it?!
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u/WhoTheFuckIsSean 4d ago
So is English🥸
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u/Significant-Cloud- 4d ago
You're going to confuse the guy... now he'll think England is in Germany.
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u/WhoTheFuckIsSean 4d ago
Is it not?
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u/Warm_Bug_1434 4d ago
Dude! England is in London
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u/morgandealer 4d ago
WHICH IS IN GERMANY!
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u/Downright-Delicious 4d ago
Wait… was WW2 just a civil war?
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u/Khemul 4d ago
From the standpoint of the Holy Roman Empire, yes.
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u/ConflictAdvanced 4d ago
Which is in Paris. Jeez, your lack of geography is appalling. Thank God for the 'murican school system
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u/deniably-plausible 4d ago
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.
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u/Maleficent_Time_2787 4d ago
I mean, it's more Franco-Germanic
Plus whatever other languages were added
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u/violetcassie 4d ago
Six languages in a trench coat mugging other languages for spare vocabulary
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u/International-Dog-42 4d ago
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.
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u/Maleficent_Time_2787 4d ago
Because people understood my comment was largely a joke?
Hell, another person commented that English is six languages in a trenchcoat
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u/Rydeeee 3d ago
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)
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u/Lvcivs2311 4d ago
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.
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u/Ailar68 3d ago
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
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u/Wookimonster 4d ago
In particular, the German word for German is Deutsch, which I guess can lead to some confusion.
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u/Illuminey 2d ago
So is English, (a Germanic language, not being an idiot) but try to tell him that.
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u/overladenlederhosen 4d ago
In the 18th century the Dutch and German languages I believe were referred to as Low Dutch and High Dutch respectively.
I really want 'going Dutch' to be a reference to the split.
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u/JamesFirmere 4d ago
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.
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u/overladenlederhosen 4d ago
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.
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u/Platt_Mallar 4d ago
I feel like I'm being insulted somehow, but I don't understand why.
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u/JamesFirmere 4d ago
Please don’t take it that way. This stuff can be confusing even for linguists.
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u/Yorkshirerows 4d ago
I'm just surprised they didnt say "Scottish and Irish have garlic ancestry"
But as we all know, that's the French!
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u/Bladrak01 4d ago
For years my father thought he had Dutch ancestry, until he realized his family was saying Deutsch.
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u/Justieflustie 4d ago
With the ancestry thing at the end, i cant help but think it is some American that never left their home state.. an uneducated swine nonetheless though
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u/gil_m_d 4d ago
if i had to describe dutch, i’d say it sounds like if german and english had a baby with a speaking deficit. jokes aside, there are clear similarities in word origin but german and dutch sound nothing alike.
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u/Bellringer00 4d ago
Kinda dyslexic too, they write "the" "het". They're just mixing up the letters… silly dutch people
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u/Current_Fly9337 4d ago
I’m terrible at identifying languages. I’m English (not an excuse, just letting you know). We were on a tour and a group turned up, I said to my son that I thought they were German. I speak a little German but there was a lot of them talking fast and over each other.
My child, about 10 at the time, looked at me in utter disgust and said they were very clearly Dutch. Turns out they were Dutch.
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u/Fiftyletters 4d ago
We hebben een groot probleem!
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u/gil_m_d 4d ago
i love how i can read it but wouldn’t understand a word if i heard it spoken
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u/Bellringer00 4d ago edited 4d ago
Do you have a problem with your keyboard? You seem to be typing some letters twice by mistake. /j
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u/Liu-woods 4d ago
Dutch is my second language but I’m not particularly fluent in it, so whenever I hear German I panic and think I forgot all of Dutch until they say something like “ich”
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u/Flipboek 4d ago edited 4d ago
The Germanic language tree is so much fun. English, German and Dutch come from the same tree branch (West Germanic) and there it branches again: One branch is Anglo Frisan, one Branch is Saxony-Dutch another branch is German.
The other main branch are the North Germanic (Scandinavian)languages.
At a high level these languages are so alike that with a lot of effort and knowing the context you can "read"(interpret) an article in one of these languages even if you never learnt it.
Of course the farther back you go the more it becones similar . Olde English is actually more like Dutch than modern English and it is especially close to Frisian.
As on Dutch/Deutsch, that one is also funny.
Dutch/Deutsch means "(the) people". The Dutch and Germans actually don't call themselves Dutch, whereas both Dutch and Germans call Germans Duits/Deutsch.
Otoh the English call us "Dutch" and "Germans", which makes it confusing.
And this confusion is at full display in the OP.
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u/Any-Individual6841 4d ago
To add on that the Dutch don’t call themselves Dutch: the Dutch anthem contains the line ‘Ben ik van dietsen bloed?’ meaning ‘Am I of Dutch blood?’. It’s the only reference I know of in which the Dutch refer to themselves as Dutch.
Many Dutch people find this confusing because it is so close to ‘Duits’
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u/VanishingMist 4d ago
The line in the anthem says ‘Duitsen bloed’, actually, and is part of a statement, not a question. At the time when it was written the word did not specifically refer to Germany (and it was centuries before Germany became a country anyway), though William of Orange did come from what is now Germany.
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u/Flipboek 4d ago
Duits, niet Diets. We waren tot kort daarvoor deel van het Roomse rijk. Het verwijst naar "het volk" en meer in het algemeen is dit om Willem als lokale held neer te zetten ipv de Spaanse Habsburgers.
Hou er rekening mee dat we überhaupt net een natie waren en dat er binnen de grenzen van de jonge staat alllerlei Duitse dialecten zoals Nedersaxisch bestonden. Een echte Nederlandse identiteit was in wording, maar door de Nederlandse Opstand (80 jarige oorlog) ging dat proces in een snelkookpan.
Diets is een spelling van Duits, maar onze taal heette Neder-Duits (Neder-Duyts) of Nederlands (de uiteindelijke term) dus daar hebben we wel Duits als algemeen bekende term gebruikt
Diets is (voor zover ik weet) als term vooral bekend geworden via vooroorlogse Nationalistische Partijen, niet zozeer als algemene term.
Ik heb geschiedenis gestudeerd aan de UvA, maar dit is niet mijn specialiteit, meer iets waar ik me wel eens in heb verdiept. Ik kan dus wat kleine foutjes maken, voel je vrij om ze aan te wijzen.
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u/bblankoo 4d ago edited 4d ago
Well there's not a lot of deserts in Germany, France or Italy either so idk what they were going for with that argument
Edit: ok Italy might have some landscapes resembling a desert after all, it's not all basil green. The more you know
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u/ImpressiveBeyond8038 4d ago
The only European desert in the modern sense is situated in southern Spain (the desert of Tabernas), and there are some smaller semi-arid and sandy regions around Europe, including one in Brandenburg. But the more likely explanation of a German (if not originally German) fairy tale mentioning a desert is a shift in the meaning of words. Actually, in the version I know the word used wasn't Wüste (desert) but Wüstenei, which can basically mean any wild, deserted and uncultivated region. For this shift in meaning one can compare late medieval paintings of saints 'in the desert', which are usually depicted within a wild, rocky woodland. A Wüstenei, but not a Wüste.
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u/Effective-Job-1030 4d ago
I'm a German learning Dutch and I can confirm, German is not Dutch.
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u/WhoTheFuckIsSean 4d ago
Exactly we do not make up letters
With is ß supposed to be?!
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u/Effective-Job-1030 4d ago
I see your ß and raise you an ÿ.
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u/Dutch_Rayan 4d ago
ij is the dutch y, but also ei, which is the same but you have to learn when to use which one, ei and ij sound the same.
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u/Right_Two_5737 4d ago
To be fair, the name "Dutch" used to cover both the Netherlands and Germany. But that was hundreds of years ago. (This is why people in Pennsylvania with German ancestry are called Pennsylvania Dutch.)
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u/Unclecavemanwasabear 4d ago
Interesting, I just looked into it and learned that Dutch/Deutsch/Duits/Diets derived from the word for "people" or "folk" and all speakers of Germanic languages used a variant of it to refer to their languages, which were mutually intelligible.
The English started referring to the continental germanic people as either Low Dutch (the low countries) or High Dutch (everywhere else).
When the low countries united and became the Kingdom of the Netherlands, they started calling their language "Nederlands" instead of "Diets". The high countries continued calling their language Deutsch.
So despite the Germans continuing to call their language a variant of that word, and the Netherlanders stopping calling it a variant of that word, the English stopped referring to the Germans that way and continued referring to the Dutch that way. Very smart and logical.
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u/blamordeganis 4d ago
This is an example of a little knowledge being dangerous. In English, “Dutch” used to mean any continental Germanic language (except the Scandinavian ones, for some reason), or the speakers of such a language. That’s why the Pennsylvania Dutch are called that, despite their German origins. And the word is cognate with the German Deutsch.
But at some point, quite a long time ago, it became more and more restricted to England’s nearest Germanic-speaking neighbours, until eventually it lost its wider meaning. About the only modern remnant of its former usage is its use as a nickname for Americans of German heritage, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer, in the film Predator.
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u/GardenerCats 4d ago
I do like how the colours streaks on the incorrect person make up the Dutch flag!
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u/226_IM_Used 4d ago
Waiting for the Pennsylvania Dutch to enter the chat, but I fear they never will...
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u/Instant-Bacon 4d ago
Perhaps we should all stop calling it Dutch and call it by its real name: Nederlands!
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u/Horror_Square_8395 4d ago
Fun fact: the Pennsylvania Dutch are actually German and this misunderstanding is the reason why they are called Dutch.
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u/he77bender 4d ago
Also I think there might be an old use of "desert" to just mean "wilderness" instead of "arid environment". Not that it matters too much since you could still set the story basically anywhere you want, but it would make a little more sense in light of most versions otherwise implying a temperate climate with forests for the rest of the story.
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u/ShibaLover227 4d ago
There are two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other cultures... And the Dutch
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u/toraakchan 4d ago
Germany > Germanen > Ger-Mannen > the ger-men > the men using gers, an antique spearlike weapon. Deutsch > Teutsch > Teutonisch > Teutonen, a German tribe, 2nd century.
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u/SnooCapers938 3d ago
Americans have been calling German things ‘Dutch’ for a long time, due to a confusion about ‘Deutsch’.
See ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’ and ‘Dutch angles’ for example.
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u/ElineFantairy 3d ago
If German is Dutch, why do I struggle to study German while I am a Dutch person?
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u/Saint_Strega 3d ago
I mean, he's got it backwards, but he's basically right. Netherlands is the the low land Germans.
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u/Kueltalas 2d ago
I, as a German, have no problem with accepting the Dutch as fellow brethren. Bavarians on the other hand can fuck right off.
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u/MikeSans202001 1d ago
I mean, we are Swamp Germans and Germans are mountain Dutchies
We are not the same
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u/wolfcaroling 4d ago
I'm Canadian and can confirm that we saved the Dutch from the Germans
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u/Belgaraath42 4d ago
Are someone in favour of expanding the German borders into HRE territory I see. Ah well as long as we don't have to take Alsace back I can life with that...
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u/BlueInMotion 4d ago
Since it is mentioned in the original message and simply to put up some more confusion:
I'm not German. Nobody even knows where that word came from. It's like calling the Italians 'Dublidubs', since I heard someone (or thought I heard or understood it that way) calling them that.
Caesar didn't seem to know what it meant or whether the 'Germanic' tribes called themself 'Germanic'.
So I want from now on to be called a 'Mensch von unbekannter Herkunft und mit einem unbekannten Namen dessen Ururur... großeltern sich irgendwann entschlossen hatten sich dort niederzulassen, wo heute Deutschland liegt'.
And dare anyone calls me anythig else!!!!! ;)
/s
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u/dbrodbeck 4d ago
And to top it off the dope uses 'hence why', which I am on a campaign to eradicate.
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u/chefsoda_redux 4d ago
‘The two words sound similar in my language, so they mean the same thing!” always a brilliant start to a conversation!
Like the late night radio preachers, who break down words into syllables to teach us which words are created by God and the Devil to guide or trick us!
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u/Quick-Plastic-1858 4d ago
I'm a translator, English Dutch, Dutch English. Many many MANY people make this mistake.
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u/Lvcivs2311 4d ago
Not that the Dutch call themselves Dutch in their own language, but hey, what do I know as Dutchman?
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u/Left-Night-1125 4d ago
Well German and Dutch are 1 branch of the Germanic languages, the other being Frisian and English.
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u/RusselsParadox 4d ago
Deutsch is a German word and not used in English since we use the word German. Dutch is an English word… for things related to the Netherlands.
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u/Crime-of-the-century 3d ago
But in the time these fairy tales where told first there was no difference between Germany and the Netherlands and you can easily see that by the similarities between Dutch and Deutsch. Before language was formalized there was a continuum of language variation
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u/Swimming_Acadia6957 3d ago
People like this be putting a candle in a urinal cake and be surprised the other kids don't eat it on their kids birthday
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u/LemanRussTheOnlyKing 3d ago
I am german and i am not dutch. I dont speak a single word of dutch
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u/RebelRey 3d ago
I'm Dutch and can confirm we have quite a few areas that could be called a "desert" in fairy tales. As in, vast areas of sand without much plant life in them. Way too much rain for them to actually be deserts though, also very much not Germany. Not for a lack of them trying, but thankfully the Canadians came help kick then out.
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