As a Native Dutch speaker that story reads like it’s written in an alternative ancient Dutch ancestor, very different vind then what I usually get from German.
Haha this had me chuckle as a native Dutch speaker.
I will admit that they nailed the German-Dutch accent.
However, the weird choice to use “translatie” which, while technically is a Dutch word, wasn’t common even back in the period this is supposed to take place and feels more like a lazy translation of… well the English word “translation”, combined with, what I can only describe as “just blurt it out as fast as you can” direction, makes this very comical.
As an English speaker who knows a bit of German, Dutch basically seems like a random combination of English and German words with a few misspellings thrown in for kicks.
Amazing how much the Dutch language has changed. I'm a native speaker and that text is very hard to decipher for me. The hand writing is beautiful but very hard to pick apart to begin with. And that is made a lot harder by the many spelling, vocabulary, and grammar changes to the language. I tried to read a few sentences but couldn't make much sense of it. I suspect I'd still have a hard time even if somebody typed the text with a more legible font. I guess, a modern translation with original drawings would actually be an interesting thing to read for a lot of historians and designers.
Dutch is a Franconian dialect though? They just didn’t go through the consonant shift like their cousins in the Rhineland. It isn’t really that closely related to Frisian or Low German and even less so to Norther Germanic.
Meta: it's kind of eerie to read an article like this that is obviously written by an 'outsider'. Although non of what's written is factually wrong (as far as I can tell, I'm no historian), the specific way certain nuances are skipped over gives it an almost 'uncanny valley' feeling. Part of it is that it's written in English and certain nuances just don't exist (like his mentioning 'Lord of the Netherlands' vs 'de Nederlanden/Nederland', his strange 'Aux quatre vents' translation - yes I know it's correct literally, but it just feels so off compared to the idiomatic meaning), others skip over so much historical and current geo-political context that it seems tone-deaf to sensitivities ('the Dutch Republic (loosely modern Holland)'). I understand that for an article on an historical painter, you cannot go into details like this, what I'm saying is the choice of what the writer considered important and the way he skips over nuance makes it feel very alien.
I guess this phenomenon is well-known by people who are from cultures that are usually written about by outsiders :) but I don't encounter it often and this specific article just evoked this really weird feeling in me. So many instances where I internally reacted with 'WFT is this guy saying' yet no actual factual errors that I can find.
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