Simply ... cannot ... resist ...

maddox · May 03, 2010, 10:18:26 AM

Some family members that live in the UK are confused about Belgium and the Netherlands.

QuoteI can't be the only one confused by Belgium and the Netherlands.

I saw this movie that was set in Holland, and I was trying to figure
out what language they were speaking.
But the first thing you'll find if you try to look up Holland
is that it's not really the name of a country.

It turns out Holland is actually the Netherlands.
So nobody speaks Hollandaise.
Holland is actually just two states (actually provinces) in the Netherlands.
But, just to make sure we're totally confused, people still call the Netherlands "Holland."

They do speak Netherlandic in the Netherlands, but nobody calls it that; everybody calls it Dutch.

And the people who live there aren't Hollandaisers or Netherlanders.
They're Dutch. Even the ones who don't speak Dutch, I guess, are Dutch.
The ones who don't speak Dutch are the Frisian-speaking Dutch; they don't live in Holland, they live in Friesland.
Maybe they call themselves Frisians. But Friesland and Holland are both in the Netherlands.

Now the Dutch aren't the only ones who speak Dutch. Right below the Netherlands is Belgium.
More than half the people in Belgium speak Dutch. But the people who live in Belgium aren't Dutch. (perhaps in the future ?)
Even the ones who speak Dutch. They're Belgians.
But Belgians don't speak Belgian.

Are you still with me?

The people in Belgium who speak Dutch live in a place called Flanders.
In the same way that Holland is and isn't the Netherlands,
Flanders is and isn't Belgium.
Flanders is north Belgium. (Belgium actually used to be part of the Netherlands;
it could therefore also be considered as the Southern Netherlands [1], or the higher low lands.)

Now they don't speak Belgianese in Belgium; they speak Flemish, which is actually Dutch.
There isn't really a language called Flemish [2].

So the Dutch Belgians are Flemings. The ones that don't speak Dutch are Walloons.
Seriously. They're called Walloons. And they live in Wallonia. (I am not making this up.)
But, as you can probably guess by now, they don't speak Walloonian.
They speak French. [3]

So by now, you might be developing the same opinion: they should just call the whole
region "Dutch-land" and be done with it. But wait, that sounds a bit like "Deutsch-land "
(Germany), doesn't it?

Well, guess what: according to http://www.geocities.com/mikenassau/BlackDutch.htm,
"Dutch is the English form of Deutsch in German (in Dutch, it's "Duits").
[Dutch] has come to mean the people of the Netherlands only in English recently; it originally meant all speakers of German in the broadest sense. The Dutch called themselves Nederduitser /
Nederduitse (Nether German, low germans) until recently, when they switched to Nederlander (low
landers)." I don't know if this is true, but it sounds plausible...

So here's what you need to know for the test:

* Holland = Netherlands, and most people speak Dutch there, but some people speak Frisian.

* The English Language is part of the Germanic language group. We have our own little subgroup, the Anglo-Frisian group, with just two members:
the English language and the Frisian language. Dutch is in the group next door to us: the Netherlandic-German
group (Netherlandic (Dutch), Afrikaans, the German language, and the Yiddish language).

[1]To add to the confusion, in English "nether" means "down below" (as in "nether world" or
"nether regions"). I don't know what "nether" (neder) means in Dutch, but it would make sense that
it means "low"; they do call these northern countries "the low countries." According to online
sources, "neder" also means "beneath". One online source claims that "Holland" came from "Holt-land" meaning forest-land, but this same source claimed that "neder" meant "flat". [back]

[2] Nearly 58 percent of the people in Belgium speak Dutch. "Flemish" is the collective term used for the Dutch dialects spoken in Belgium. It is not a separate language, though the term is often used to distinguish the Dutch spoken in Flanders from that of the Netherlands.
"Flanders" is the name for the Dutch-speaking northern region of the federal state of Belgium. [back]

[3] This actually seems less silly when you learn that "Waloon" is actually a derivative of the French "Valone," and isn't actually pronounced "wah-loon.

Nobody · May 03, 2010, 12:31:25 PM

Well that sounds like a good summery to me, although it lets the issue sound more complex than it is.

I don't speak Dutch or Nederlands, put I'm pretty sure that the confusion about the word "neder", whether it mean "low" or "flat" is moot - at least I understand it as both.

maddox · May 03, 2010, 01:29:34 PM

It's even more complex.

As Babs pointed out, Belgium has some German speaking parts, a left over from WW I. The "Oostkantons".
Politicaly those are joined to Walonia, much to the chagrin of the locals, who cultural and gramatical lean closer Flanders.

Also, if "Holland" and "Nederland" already are confusing, imagine the bewildering effect to learn that Flanders is actualy 5 provinces. East and West Flanders, Antwerp, Brabant and Limburg.

With Brabant and Limburg having simular named provinces in the Netherlands.

Then we add in the waffle-iron politics (this means, if Flanders recive €X in infrastructure, Walonia revieves the same amount in simular infrastructure, with as prime example, when Flanders got to expand the port of Zeebrugge, Walonia got money for the boatlift of Strépy Thieu .

Compounded by the fact we have more governments than an avarage super power. And that there are certain laws making it possible that certain political minorities can block law proposals just by invoking those laws.

Guinness · May 03, 2010, 01:35:39 PM

Quote from: maddox on May 03, 2010, 01:29:34 PM
Compounded by the fact we have more governments than an avarage super power. And that there are certain laws making it possible that certain political minorities can block law proposals just by invoking those laws.

I dunno. This sounds a lot like the system of government in the US, which holds power often in thrice nested municipalities, then in the states, and finally in the federal government, and especially like our Senate, which is always subject to becoming victimized by the tyranny of the minority (no matter which party is in power).

"Democratic" government, no matter it's form, is by necessity a messy exercise in consensus, or anti-consensus and usually fairly inefficient animal. Oligarchic or autocratic forms generally appear more efficient, at least on their face. One could (and many have) write long long books on this subject.

In other words, it's not peculiar to Belgium.