Keane said:
I'd love it if everyone knew a universal language, though I'd say a majority of people know English these days. I guess when it comes to relationships with people from different countries it's a thing, as well as if internet friends were to meet. Could RPC actually meet and fully communicate in English in real life?
English is easy to learn though. It's a pretty basic. To fully learn Dutch you wouldn't have to just learn the language but also certain phrases, sayings, dialects, expressions, slang that has pretty much become part of everyone's vocabulary and sometimes there a lot of words to describe the same thing.
There are English speakers who can speak Dutch quite well, almost unrecognizable as a foreigner for a Dutch person, because our languages are very similar. A probability is that the ancient Germanic tribes who moved from Denmark to the south and later to England already had certain expressions which were in this way incorporated in both Dutch and English. This would explain why we both use expressions like:
Dutch: Het is mijn missie om mensen blij te maken.
English: It's my mission to make people happy.
However this word exists in other languages too, this way of using the word seems to be only present in Dutch and English. I used an online dictionary for this one:
Dutch: als de kat weg is, dansen de muizen
English: when the cat's away, the mice will play
It is especially these kinds of expressions which particularly amaze me in the similarity, which means that we either used these expressions aftering hearing them from English/Dutch speakers, in which the other side started to use the same expression in their own language, or we already used these expressions in like 200 before Christ and we still use them in our seperated languages. There was a videoclip in which an English guy used Old English to communicate with a guy from Frisia, and guess what? The Frisian guy could actually understand something of what he said. Of all the Germanic languages, Frisian is the closest one to English, I guess the second-closest is Dutch and the third-closest could be German, but I 'm not sure. Although you can find back the relationship with English in German, it's harder to recognize for a person who knows nothing about German.
Here is the video:
I was just thinking that since the way Latin is structured makes a lot of sense to me.
I just joined here today!
