In 2009 the Netherlands and Japan celebrated their 400th anniversary of trade relations. The story goes that back in 1609 shogun Tokugawa Iesayu issued an official trade permit to the Netherlands. Although the Portugese were the first Westerners to show up in Japan back in the mid 16th century, they were more preoccupied with pushing religion than doing business and eventually left. They did leave words like ‘tempura’ behind that most people still think is Japanese.
(I can’t believe the introduction to Japan course I had to take to finish my university studies because it fit my schedule is actually of some use!)
Another huge link between the two countries is the Tokugawa shogunate’s desire to learn about all things Western, all while practicising a policy of isolation of Japan from the world. And so Japan developed ‘rangaku’ (’Dutch Learning’, also meaning ‘Western learning’), with the Dutch as a unique source of information about medicine and science in general. History notes that the Japanese were pretty freaked out at seeing men with red hair for the first time.
And knowing that Japan is not only up to speed with the Western world, but can kick its backside any time it wants, business is still a major common point and apparently worthy of a new online magazine.
Download the first issue of the The Netherlands-Japan Review as a PDF for free. Articles are in Dutch and English.
(Link: breitbart.com. Illustration by 17th century artist Yoshida Hambei)
* We digitize all Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals from 1470. …
* We make agreements about copyright in order to guarantee free access to our collections. …
The KB in 2013: …
* We offer a service for digitization on demand (digitisation of texts from the paper collection on request) in order to meet the wishes of individual clients. …
* We keep a digitisation register that prevents possible overlap of digitization activities by other institutions. …
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library) will not only digitize printed works, but will also archive digital works such as web pages. According to Trouw, the first 10% of 600 million books pages to be digitized should be available in 2013.
Husein Mujagić survived the Omarska camp in the Bosnian war and now lives in the Dutch province of Limburg. To help him deal with his memories, he wrote a Dutch-Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian dictionary. This description didn’t come over as straightforward, so I will elaborate. Roughly, Bosnian is what people speak in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbian is spoken by Serbs and Croatian by Croatians. It’s way more complex, as Serbo-Croatian was long taught as one language, but that is slowly being spilt apart for cultural reasons. Yes, everybody understands each other, but there were reasons why the country split up into so many parts.
Mujagić was a math teacher in his own country and since he could not easily find work without speaking good Dutch, he worked as a janitor at a school. He’s always wanted to help children learn, and this two-part dictionary was his way of helping them do so, as he started with words his children would know. Both his sons are well-employed and are doing well, something Mujagić is very proud of.
After 10 years, his dictionary has more than 3,000 pages, but he only had some 100 copies printed for friends and family, Bosnian and Dutch. He alo reassures the Dutch that with his dictionary, they can make themselves understood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia, now all seperate countries.
Different but yet similar, last year we posted about a Dutch missionary in Malawi who wrote a English-Chichewa dictionary.
I’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone Happy New Year! Our resolutions for 2010 are to take more pictures and make more videos, and continue to post the good stuff. Please send us more stuff, too!
Filed under: Literature by Orangemaster @ 11:14 am
In November, we told you that Twitteren (’to Twitter’) was chosen as the Dutch Word of the Year by the Onze Taal (’Our Language’) congress in Utrecht.
Well, now that the year is almost over, Onze Taal together with newspaper De Pers and Van Dale (they make the Dutch dictionary) have chosen ‘ontvrienden’ (’to unfriend’) as the Word of the Year 2009. The New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2009 is also ‘unfriend’, which like in Dutch means “to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site”. When they explain it they use Facebook as an example of a social networking site and in Dutch they keep it local and say Hyves.
Whether you prefer ‘Twitteren’ or ‘ontvrienden’, they both go to show how much of an impact social media has had on language, never mind IT as a general rule over the last 20 years. Like the Oxford people say, ‘unfriend’ definitely has ‘lex-appeal’.
Filed under: Literature by Branko Collin @ 8:05 pm
I just got back from the Onze Taal (’Our Language’) congress in Utrecht, where the word ‘twitteren’ was elected Word of the Year 2009.
The word, which simply means ‘to twitter,’ was chosen over Koninginnedagdrama, the deeply racist kopvoddentax, Mexicaanse griep and vuvuzela by 600 of the attendants. Another candidate was mama appelsap, for a misheard lyric. Mama appelsap literally means “mother apple juice,” but is Michael Jackson’s misheard lyric “Mama-se, mama-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa.”
The 27th congress featured talks about language by Princess Laurentien, writer Kristien Hemmerechts, and performances by comedians Paulien Cornelisse and Kees Torn.
Filed under: Art, Literature by Branko Collin @ 1:28 pm
Oh, to have been a child in the 1920s, when you had children’s books illustrated in the De Stijl style. Gouden Vlinders, the cover of which pictured above, contained verse written by S. Franke and illustrations by Lou Loebe.
Filed under: Art, Literature by Branko Collin @ 11:34 am
English translations of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo have been released in a 6 volume boxed set by the Van Gogh Museum in a 15-year-long cooperation with the Huygens Instituut. The original letters in French and Dutch have also been reproduced.
The entire set contains all the pictures referenced in the letters, that is, all 4,300 of them, The Guardian reports.
If you don’t feel like shelling out the 325 UKP that the set is undoubtedly worth, you can also read the letters and their translations at vangoghletters.org. The Huygens Instituut is part of the Dutch academy for sciences.
Story via Eamelje.net (Dutch), who in a totally unrelated story also points out that another Dutch giant of the 19th century, writer Multatuli, published his masterpiece Max Havelaar 150 years ago last Tuesday. The Havelaar has been in translation for a long time, and a public domain English version can be found at Google Books.
If you do not like PDF or EPUB, you might be able to extract the HTML version from the EPUB file (which is just a ZIP archive under a different name).
“Here you can see Anne Frank leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom. It’s the only time Anne Frank has ever been captured on film, according to the Anne Frank House.”
Remember that if the people over at Dutch copyright collection agency Buma Stemra have their way, we won’t be able to show you fun vids anymore because it would cost us thousands of euro a year. Feel free to sign the petition: petitiononline.
Also in Anne Frank news, an asteroid between the Mars and Jupiter has been named Miep Gies last Sunday in honour of the Dutch woman who preserved the diary of Anne Frank. “The International Astronomical Union (IAU) said it wanted to draw attention to the steadfast courage of the now 100-year-old last surviving helper of the Frank family who hid in a building behind a house in Amsterdam during World War II.”
Hans Bauer from Groningen must remove 5,000 books from his home, after a court agreed with housing corporation Patrimonium last Tuesday that his library constitutes a fire hazard.
Telegraaf reports (Dutch) that Bauer had already voluntarily removed 4,000 books earlier after the housing corporation had complained. Looking at the picture accompanying the article, I cannot say that his house looks more cluttered than several book stores I’ve known, although truth be told none of them are still around today. And 5,000 books is peanuts compared to for instance the library of late writer, TV presenter and bibliophile Boudewijn Büch, which counted 100,000 works at one point in time.
In the meantime, a local self storage company has given Bauer six months worth of free storage, RTV Noord reports (Dutch).
From the Strategic Plan 2010-2013 of the Dutch national library:
I just got back from the Onze Taal (’Our Language’) congress in Utrecht, where the word ‘twitteren’ was elected Word of the Year 2009. 
English translations of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo have been released in a 6 volume boxed set by the Van Gogh Museum in a 15-year-long cooperation with the Huygens Instituut. The original letters in French and Dutch have also been reproduced.
Hans Bauer from Groningen must remove 5,000 books from his home, after a court agreed with housing corporation Patrimonium last Tuesday that his library constitutes a fire hazard.