Ask a Dutchman!

[Takhisis]

What if the US had spoken Dutch instead of English?

 

[anandus]

What if the US had spoken Dutch instead of English?

German would be a lot more plausible.
What was it, a quarter of the union soldiers in the civil war were German, something like that?
And German was, for a long time (until WW1), the second most spoken language, after English, in the US?

But Dutch? Nah.

And for the "what if's" I've picked a few things:
BB Koning (BB King)
Rots & Rollen (Rock & Roll)
Beschaving (Civilization)
Spelletjes (Games)

 

[mayor]

German would be a lot more plausible.
What was it, a quarter of the union soldiers in the civil war were German, something like that?
And German was, for a long time (until WW1), the second most spoken language, after English, in the US?

But Dutch? Nah.

And for the "what if's" I've picked a few things:
BB Koning (BB King)
Rots & Rollen (Rock & Roll)
Beschaving (Civilization)
Spelletjes (Games)

Well, you never know If "we" managed to keep Nieuw Amsterdam who knows what would have happened

 

[Tahuti]

Tried the Nederlander settings for the keyboard, no IJ showed up.

Actually, almost all keyboards in the Netherlands are US. Also, IJ doesn't have an ASCII code (unlike other ligatures such ae), so it isn't really strange you can't find it anywhere, not even on Dutch keyboards.

 

[Takhisis]

Clearly the Netherlands should gather their armed forces together and issue an ultimatum of war on whoever'll pay attention unless said people who apy attention agree to include an ij key for keyboards.

 

[Agent327]

After cutbacks that's probably all our 'armed forces' are good for now: issue an ultimatum.

 

[PaxImperator]

After cutbacks that's probably all our 'armed forces' are good for now: issue an ultimatum.

Sod 'em. We'll send in our new Minister of Defence.

 

[Optical]

Is binge drinking existent/a problem in the Netherlands? (And, for anyone who's visited New Zealand) How would it compare to the (considerable) problem here?

 

[Agent327]

Apparently certain youngsters like to go what's called coma drinking (drinking til you're in a coma and/or need to be shipped off to First Aid). Raising the alcohol drinking limit to 16 years may not have helped there (it might even be related to it, seeing as when you turn 16 all of a sudden you can buy all the alcohol you can afford). I'm not sure if it's a big problem though: it happens, but it's not like an epidemic.

Sod 'em. We'll send in our new Minister of Defence.

I see she's standing in front of a tank on loan (last cutback scrapped all of our tanks).

 

[Optical]

Interesting, especially that age limit. It's at 18 here and that has little to no effect.

 

[anandus]

Interesting, especially that age limit. It's at 18 here and that has little to no effect.

They are going to raise the age limit here as well from 16 to 18, although that'll have no effect.
The average age of those so-called 'coma drinkers' is 15.4, so the age limit of 16 didn't work very well either.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

The Dutchboy who plugged the dike - Is that a national legend? Did he grow up to be Plumber-in-Chief? What's the 411?

Hans Bleeker...

Hans Brinker actually

Some early American settlers were Dutch. "New Amsterdam" became New York City. Peter Minuit, a Walloon, purchased Manhattan from the local Amerinds for 60 guilders worth of goods (legend - "beads"). Many of our folk legends are vaguely Dutch (Rip Van Winkle). The Roosevelts were of Dutch descent.

The term Yankees comes from combining two Dutch names: Jan and Kees. When referring to the Dutch, since we're all called that, they said: them JanKeesses.

 

[Agent327]

Didn't know that.

Hans Brinker actually

Oh yeah... well, as said, it's not a Dutch myth, so nobody taught us.

 

[Leoreth]

Apparently certain youngsters like to go what's called coma drinking (drinking til you're in a coma and/or need to be shipped off to First Aid).

I'm always surprised how many media buzzwords / neologisms Dutch and German share.

 

[Agent327]

Komasaufen?

 

[anandus]

Indeed:

In letzter Zeit wird im deutschen Sprachraum für diese Interpretation von „Rauschtrinken“ – vor allem in Zusammenhang mit Kindern und Jugendlichen – meist der Ausdruck „Komasaufen“ verwendet.

('Rauschtrinken' is 'binge drinking', I think?)

Speaking of German-Dutch-connectivity:
I was highly amused when an American friend of mine referred to the Dutch as 'swamp Germans'

 

[Glassfan]

The term Yankees comes from combining two Dutch names: Jan and Kees...

Yeah, I looked it up;

Spoiler :

"Yankee probably comes from the Dutch Jan Kess, "John Cheese," a disparaging European nickname for the cheese-making, cheese-eating Hollanders since the 1650s. By 1663 the Dutch settlers in New York seemed to have turned the term Yankee around, using it as a derisive name for their neighboring English settlers to the north in Connecticut. Soon British soldiers, who had been calling English settlers Brother Jonathans, implying a rustic simpleness or stupidity, were calling them all Yankees, as when General Wolfe used the word in referring to his New England colonial troops in a 1758 letter to another British officer:

"My posts are now so fortified that I can offer you two companies of Yankees and the more, as they are better for ranging and scouting than either work or vigilance"

Southern colonists, who felt that their northern counterparts were too shrewd and calculating, also took to calling them Yankees; but New Englanders saw the word as a tribute to their ingenuity and cunning, and so proudly adopted it, though the term Yankee pedlar didn't appear until the early 1800s."

-Stuart Berg Flexner, I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated History of American Words and Phrases.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

I never heard the Jan Cheese explanation. (Kess is meaningless by the way, dutch for cheese is kaas, or it must be some sort of ancient dutch, otherwise the Jan Kees one makes more sense to me)

Nice bit of extra info as well

 

[Leoreth]

Indeed:

('Rauschtrinken' is 'binge drinking', I think?)

Yeah. "Rausch" is inebriation, literally. Although it comes in handy that German has a word for "civilized drinking" (trinken) and one for "uncivilized drinking" (saufen). Does Dutch have a similar distinction?

 

[PaxImperator]

I see she's standing in front of a tank on loan (last cutback scrapped all of our tanks).

I believe it's a self-propelled howitzer, actually. Still, I'm getting rather fed up of the continuous defence cuts.

Yeah. "Rausch" is inebriation, literally. Although it comes in handy that German has a word for "civilized drinking" (trinken) and one for "uncivilized drinking" (saufen). Does Dutch have a similar distinction?

Certainly! "drinken" and "zuipen"