Re: Danish enigma

> From a Dutch perspective this looks very English.
>
> As for the first type of examples, Dutch sentences like "Ik heb

twee

> jaar als leraar gewerkt" tend to imply that the speaker is no

longer

> working as a teacher at the moment of speaking unless drastic
> measures are taken to avoid that implication. This is a recurrent
> source of misunderstandings and mistranslations. ("I definitely
> thought you'd said you had a different job now ...".)

Talking about temporal misunderstandings, here of the progressive:
There was the Dutch pilot on Tenerife who reported to the tower: "I
am at take-off" meaning "I'm taking off" (Ik ben aan't ...), but
being understood by the tower as "I'm standing at the taking-off
point". The linguistic element was played down at least in those
English TV-reports I've seeen, partly because the investigators
didn't get the point ("procedures must be tightened" and other
general blah-blah), and partly because they saw it as a ploy by the
Dutch to shirk responsibility ("The Dutch understand English
perfectly well!" etc).


Torsten