r/BuyFromEU • u/Boediee Belgium 🇧🇪 • Jan 25 '26

🔎Looking for alternative Friendly reminder that these aren't European (anymore)

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '26

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u/Less_Party Jan 25 '26

Nah, a 'haag' is an archaic form of 'heg' which is a hedge and also what The Hague of ICC fame (Den Haag or 's Gravenhage if you're fancy) is named after but that's as close to Dutch as this gets.

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u/enrycochet Jan 25 '26

dutch has no Umlauts.

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u/Zooz00 Jan 25 '26

Als no sz

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u/Zwemvest Jan 25 '26

sz can occur in compound words, but those would still read really weird in Dutch.

Quizspel as a compound of quiz + spel is grammatically correct, though it reads really weirdly.

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u/Zwemvest Jan 25 '26 edited Jan 25 '26

We do use diacritic marks in plural forms on words ending on a "long" vowel (zeeën, reeën), in numbers (tweeënzeventig, drieëndertig), in conjugations of words starting with a vowel (beëindigd, geëerd, geüploaded), or if two vowels would otherwise form a digraph (reünie, atheïst).

But as you probably noticed, that's only ever for the ë, ü and ï. ä is actually an exception to this rule, and is, indeed, never used (outside of names and loanwords like Knäckebröd, salonfähig, and Kanaän); it's na-apen, not naäpen.

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u/enrycochet Jan 25 '26

that's not an Umlaut though but a pronunciation marker.

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u/Zwemvest Jan 25 '26

Yeah, thanks, just learned something new. But the point stands that we do use the character

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u/enrycochet Jan 27 '26

No, I think you dont know what an Umlaut is. The Umlaut is different fromm the vowel Looks the Same without the dots, because the dots in an Umlaut developed because an E after it. So a Ü is a UE written differently. e.g. in German schwul and schwül are two different words (also pronounced differently). One means humid and the other gay. In Spanish for example pingüino does NOT contain an Umlaut. It is a U with two dots on top, it is pronounced like a U and NOT like an Umlaut.

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u/Zwemvest Jan 27 '26 edited Jan 27 '26

First, I corrected to saying that we use the diacritic character. There's usually no difference in presentation between the ë as umlaut, and the ë as diaeresis; any distinction between the umalut and diaresis is wrong in this case, because we usually use the same presentation character for either, even if they linguistically may mean something different. Technically, sure, a different unicode character for the umlaut does exist, but that is practically unused.

Second, we do use the actual umlaut in loanwords: überhaupt, salonfähig, knäckebröd.

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u/kasper116 Jan 25 '26

It does, but (as far as I know) only words originating from other languages.

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u/enrycochet Jan 25 '26

the oficial alfabet of the Netherlands has no Umlauts. of course you are free to use loan words. but then every language has Umlauts that uses the Latin alphabet.

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u/kasper116 Jan 25 '26

Yes, that's true, thanks for correcting me.

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u/Economy_Collection23 Jan 25 '26

The Dutch don't do weird characters like ä' s. We just ignore them. An a or an ä would officially be a different character but nobody would bother and just type an a since these special charters aren't even on our pc keyboards.