Forgiving nature of Dutch people means little lost in translation

LETTER FROM THE HAGUE:The Roma can't or won't learn Dutch, which is something they have in common with expats

SOME THINGS never change, and one of them is the inability of foreigners to learn Dutch.

Luckily, what never changes either is the forgiving nature of most Dutch people and their willingness to display their fluent English at the first sound of a mangled guttural. They put us to shame, but in a nice way.

Ironically though, it’s the chilled attitude of the Netherlanders which does most to let expats off the hook. It allows us to blame our hosts for our own appalling laziness in never really attempting to master the two different types of noun, the three distinct forms of “you”, and the virtually imperceptible chink between the ei and ij sounds.

“But you speak such good English,” we insist smugly – in English of course – with a distain for our physical wellbeing that we’d never dream of displaying in France. And yes, most of the time it works. The Dutch are flattered. And so they should be.

They like to be good at things, and generally they are.

However, even now we’re not content. Having placed the blame firmly where it’s undeserved, we follow up with a series of utterly predictable “killer blows”.

The Dutch language, we argue, has always been a bit of a mix-em-gather-em. Look, the Dutch for "number" is nummer. The word for office is the French word bureau, which has gradually become transmogrified into buro. And eau de cologne is now odeklonje(complete with the diminutive -je at the end), for goodness sake.

And then there's the official Woordenlijst Nederlandse Taal, also known as the Groene Boekjeor Little Green Book, which once a decade updates the entirety of the words taken to constitute the Dutch language. The 2005 edition added 10,000 new words and 9,000 spelling changes. How could anyone possibly keep up, we lament? Not easily. And yet we Irish have had this particular bar set extraordinarily high for us by one Jack O'Neill, fictional gentleman, who journeyed to The Hague in the first years of the 20th century, determined not alone to learn Dutch, but to master it.

O'Neill's tale is told in a bizarre often-amusing little book called A n Irishman's Difficulties with the Dutch Language, published in 1915 by John Irvin Browne from Limavady who found himself – as happens in life – vicar at the Scots Presbyterian Church in Rotterdam.

The tale begins one November evening in O’Neill’s rooms in Trinity College, where we hear about his obsession with the life and times of William the Silent, his growing expertise in Dutch fine art, particularly Rembrandt – all frustrated by his fruitless struggle to learn Dutch.

“The language isn’t child’s play, that’s the truth,” he tells his colleagues. “Why the whole thing’s next to impossible!” The only way to succeed is to visit Holland and immerse himself in the language.

He chooses a boarding house in The Hague precisely because the landlady speaks not a word of English. “There’s nothing like being cast completely on your own resources, they say. Still, it was a bit awkward at coffee time, when the landlady came up and talked. She poured forth a rapid and resistless stream of friendly Dutch upon me, while I nodded in the intervals and tried to think. It was a very one-sided business.”

Happily, O’Neill does have his small triumphs: “Nouns, of course. All nouns. That’s the secret. True basis of any language. It’s a discovery of my own . . . you can never be at a loss. But I stick in a proverb too, here and there, wherever it comes handy.”

I haven’t tested the O’Neill Method yet. However, in the interests of research I did cycle 4 or 5km to the neighbouring village of Wassenar, the Dalkey of The Hague and home to Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and his wife, Princess Maxima, The American School of The Hague, and countless English-speaking expat diplomats, academics and business people.

It’s also, by the way, the privileged setting where the filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh – great-grandnephew of the penniless artist – was born. He was assassinated in 2004 after making a documentary about the murder of right-wing politician, Pim Fortuyn, known for his extreme views on immigration.

Sure enough, among the tables of Bagel Alley on Langstraat, the expat morning-coffee magnet, the predominant language was English, much of it American-accented. Newspapers in evidence included the International Herald Tribuneand the Financial Times.

In The Hague, 10km away, talks continued on the formation of a new right-leaning coalition government, to include Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party. Agreement was near but there are always complications.

The latest was the controversy over the Roma and their inability or unwillingness to integrate. There are calls for their expulsion. It seems one of the biggest problems is that they just can’t or won’t learn Dutch. It’s an irony utterly lost on the expats of Wassenar.