r/lovethissmug • u/RespUnin • 11h ago

😻 Meme Or Other Online Trope πŸ˜‚ I love these Dutch posts

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It's like if someone went to a business conference but only spoke through Doge memes

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152

u/a_demon_from_hell 11h ago

As someone who is Dutch I hate these memes because I simply cannot comprehend what's so funny about any of this 😭

131

u/oogrug 10h ago edited 10h ago

dutch orthography looks "silly" to non-dutch speaking anglophones because, among other things, multiple words are close enough to english that they read like misspellings (serieus, kan, probleem) or slang (dat dat). then there are words whose spellings don't make intuitive sense to many anglophones (mbt). and while people who read dutch know that oo and ee represent /oː/ and /eː/, many anglophones read them as /uː/ and /i/; importantly, when oo and ee function as digraphs in english, the words often feel silly, cute, or otherwise unserious (poop, boob, goo; pee, wee, bee)

18

u/Nigel2602 7h ago

To be fair, mbt is an abbreviation for 'met betrekking tot' (Wilders even spelled it wrong, it should be m.b.t.). Spelling a full word like that wouldn't make sense in Dutch either.

5

u/LaunchTransient 7h ago

Wilders even spelled it wrong

Twitter had a character limit of 140 characters (though when Wilders posted this the limit was up to 280), which encouraged people to cut superfluous punctuation. I can only imagine that is the reason.

1

u/a-stack-of-masks 5h ago

Nah ink is duur fam. aint nobody got time or budget for interpunctie.

1

u/Any_Description_4204 6h ago

Nah most people don’t take the effort to put periods in abbreviations, especially on mobile when you have to switch to another keyboard for it

1

u/LaunchTransient 6h ago

The full stop is standard in the bottom right of mobile keyboards.