Arabic & Amsterdam Dutch

[Ruud Harmsen]

Who would have thought that the Amsterdam variety of Dutch had a
phonetic peculiarity in common with Arabic? Yet it is so. I’m referring
to the “thick n” in words like "betekent", "mensen" (e.g. Adele
Bloemendaal did it very clearly in the song the name of which I forgot).
I already suspected it to be the same phenomemon as the “thick l” in
melk (not mellek, but really melk), which is common in Dutch, and also
in English and Portuguese. Yet I didn’t manage to apply this to the n,
being a non-Amsterdam Dutchman. I always had the idea that it involved
some kind of o-colouring, as in the “lepol” pronounciation for “lepel”
(spoon), but with an n this didn’t seem to work.
That was until I noticed that it needed the same tongue-position as the
emphatic s, d, and t in Arabic. Phonetically I think this is
velarization or glottalisation. Now if I practice the Arabic emfatic s,
and then with the same movement do the n in “mensen”, I do get the
Amsterdam sound.
From a didactic point of view it is noteworthy, that I find it difficult
to apply something that happens in my own language to another sound,
whereas it becomes easier when tried via a language foreign to me, and
very difficult (I can pronounce Arabic slowly, but do not speak or
understand it).

[T.T. Gerritsen]

rhar...@knoware.nl (Ruud Harmsen) wrote:

>I already suspected it to be the same phenomemon as the “thick l” in
>melk (not mellek, but really melk), which is common in Dutch, and also
>in English and Portuguese. Yet I didn’t manage to apply this to the n,
>being a non-Amsterdam Dutchman. I always had the idea that it involved
>some kind of o-colouring, as in the “lepol” pronounciation for “lepel”
>(spoon), but with an n this didn’t seem to work.

My Dutch teacher in highschool was from Amsterdam and she used to
pronounce "betekent" like "betekont", although she was supposed to
speak ABN :-). So it seems there is, under certain circumstances,
something like an emphatic "n" in Amsterdam pronunciation...

>That was until I noticed that it needed the same tongue-position as the
>emphatic s, d, and t in Arabic. Phonetically I think this is
>velarization or glottalisation. Now if I practice the Arabic emfatic s,
>and then with the same movement do the n in “mensen”, I do get the
>Amsterdam sound.

Interesting observation, I'll forward this to a good friend of mine,
who teaches Arabic at Utrecht University. May it is of help to his
first-year students....