Friday 20 July 2012

Dikker or Dichter?

Thanks to Flanders Today (p.16), I'm reminded of the need to know vocabulary well and throughly!

 “The Gentse Feesten bring people fatter together” Prime minister Elio Di Rupo confuses dichter (closer) with dikker (fatter)

This could be of course not that Di Rupo didn't know the word, rather than he didn't pronounce the soft 'ch' sound /dɪxt/ but made it into a hard 'k' sound: dikkter sounds more like dikker than dichter!

From Middle Dutch dicht, from Old Dutch *thīht, from Proto-Germanic *þinhtaz (Note that English took a different evolutionary route: thiht became thicce became thick.).