Subj : this echo
To   : Serg Agarkoff
From : Ron van Stokkom
Date : Fri Mar 02 2001 10:15 am

Serg,

On 01 Mar 01 at 19:03 Serg Agarkoff wrote to Ger Vloothuis:

 SA> Saturday February 24 2001, Ger Vloothuis writes to Ron van Stokkom:
Hmm, to get a little bit on topic again, we seem to have (had) a little 
networking problem here. Gers message didn't arrive here (yet).

 GV>> Er zijn nog 15 miljoen Nederlands sprekenden voor U.....
 SA> Translate this to english, please. It looks like "There is about 15M
 SA> of Dutch-speaking people", but I'm not sure.
Something like that. Gers figure, the 15 million is not right. There are about 
16 million in The Netherlands alone. Next to that i guess some 5 million 
Flemish (Belgium), a few in France, some 100.000 of the Dutch Antillian people. 
Next to this it is the official language in Suriname. Afrikaans is also very 
Dutch. The total number of people speaking Dutch is estimated to be about 25 
million, some 0.5% of the world population.

 SA> Dutch looks very similar to "english with hard german accent". Am I
 SA> wrong?
Many Dutch people will tell you that German and Dutch are not comparable. 
However, they wish it to be more different than it is. Saying this, i have to 
agree there are many differences. A German will not be able to follow a Dutch 
conversation. The same is true for many Dutchmen and the many dialects spoken 
in The Netherlands.

Ron.

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