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General Philatelic/Gen. Discussion : 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

 

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philb
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30 Jul 2016
09:41:49pm

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I was looking through some Dutch Indies covers when my CURIOUS wife started reading this 1819 cover from a coffee grower in Paramaribo ..the dealer says he gave it to her..but i have a feeling it was tagged on my bill. It will be fun for her to interpret the 1819 Dutch !Image Not Found

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Bobstamp
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31 Jul 2016
01:43:20pm
re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

If it can be translated! I understand that Old Dutch and New Dutch are very different animals. A Dutch-speaking friend of mine gave me a great deal of help with one of my projects, about the crash of the Dutch KLM DC-2 Uiver in Iraq in 1934. Uiver in Old Dutch meant Stork. Today it doesn't exist as a word, or so I've been told. As an aside, my friend, Ben Guilliamse, who died when his plane crashed in Prince George, BC several years ago, explained to me that it's easy to speak Dutch. All you have to do is speak English with your mouth full of finishing nails! Day Dreaming

I think that one of the interesting aspects of philately is that it's not difficult or expensive to hold fascinating documents in your hands that other people created, held in their hands, and read long before our time. Some covers in my collection include personal letters with descriptions of the London Blitz and mentions of the impact of the Battle of the Atlantic on Brits, a complaint about unnecessary training deaths after the war, and even a brief description of the sound of guns at the Front in France in 1917. One poignant cover was sent to a Canadian tank crewman in 1944, but returned marked "DECEASED". He was killed the day after last day of the Battle of Falaise, in which a large proportion of the German army was destroyed in a pincer movement by Canadian, British, Polish, and American armies.

Bob

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philb
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31 Jul 2016
02:40:01pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Bob, perhaps thats why the Dutch dictionary is tiny compared to the English. I think the Dutch language has changed twice since my wifes mother was born. I go by "stampcollector" but i am really a postal history nut..i rarely buy a stamp at a stamp show. I know most if not all of the covers the dealers mark one dollar,five dollars or fifteen are not worth nearly that much....but if you want them ..you pay. The dealer finds the item however he does...he pays for the table he sits at..so i guess he can ask what he wants for an item .

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Jansimon
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31 Jul 2016
03:42:06pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

I have to step in now, for at least three reasons.
First of all, uiver is not old Dutch for stork. It is a dialect word (East Netherlands as a matter of fact) where the official word is "ooievaar".

Secondly, 19th century Dutch is not considered Old Dutch. It is different from modern Dutch, that is true, but mostly in style and in spelling. Any Dutchman can read 19th century prose or other texts, but most will find it weird, because the way things are said just change. But that's the same for English. Jane Austen's novels or even Shakespeare are not considered Old English, or are they? Beowulf - that's old English (and probably closer to old Dutch and Frisian than to modern English, but that would be another story).

Finally, as a Dutchman I must protest against the dictionary remark. The official Dutch dictionary, the WNT or "Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal" is (start Wiki-quote): "The largest monolingual dictionary in the world, it contains over 450,000 entries for Dutch words from 1500 to 1921. The paper edition consists of 43 volumes (including three supplements), almost 50,000 pages. The dictionary was almost 150 years in the making; the first volume was published in 1864, and the final volume was presented to Albert II of Belgium and Beatrix of the Netherlands in 1998." I rest my case Big Grin

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philb
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31 Jul 2016
04:39:45pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

i give up !

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okstamps
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31 Jul 2016
05:51:17pm
re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

As an American who spoke no language other than English, I accepted a work-related transfer to The Netherlands in 1997 to a small research center that my company had established just outside of Leiden (between Amsterdam and Rotterdam). My company had operations world-wide and required all employees to communicate in English (which included all written communication), so getting along at work was no problem. I was very curious, however, how well I would be able to get along outside of work.

I was surprised to find out that almost everyone in The Netherlands is at least bilingual, with English universally understood along with Dutch. I quickly understood why this was the case as it seemed that about half of the television programs were in English and all the movies were in English. No dubbing of the native language over the English as you find in Germany or France, just Dutch subtitles on the bottom of the screen. And these were all American television shows and American movies, so the Dutch spoken English is with much more of an American accent than with a British accent.

This came in very handy for me as I was able to catch all the latest American movie releases in the local theaters. I never had a television to pick up the local television signals (they are different than the American standard, so my American television did not work). What interested me, however, was which television shows were shown. Of all the American television shows to pick from, the two that I noticed specifically were Rosanne and The Jerry Springer Show. One day at work one the Dutch secretaries came over to me and asked, "I was watching Jerry Springer last night, and are all you Americans like that?" What a great way to portray American culture and Americans in general!

I was 40 years old when I transferred over. I had always heard that it became progressively more difficult to learn a new language as one gets older, and after my 2+ years in The Netherlands, I could not agree more. As an attempt to learn Dutch, I enrolled in a university night class that taught Dutch to native English speakers. Before the first night's lesson was complete, however, I knew that I was not going to do well. The instructor started the lesson by going through the alphabet pronouncing it in Dutch. When she got to "V" and "W", I had to stop her and ask her to repeat those letters since I could not distinguish any difference when I heard them. She did a couple of times and got a bit exasperated when I still couldn't differentiate the two. I dropped the class a couple of weeks later when I realized that this just wasn't going to work out for me.

Dutch is very difficult to pronounce. While German is guttural, Dutch is much more so. As much as I tried, whenever I tried to speak anything in Dutch, from a place name to a simple phrase, none of the Dutch that I worked with claimed that they could understand me. So I just gave up after a time.

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philb
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31 Jul 2016
06:40:02pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

When we go over and i talk to my nephews in their 20's they do not miss a beat..they are up to all the current young people slang..at one time they spoke a correct England type English but now the media has corrupted them !Happy

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Bobstamp
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31 Jul 2016
08:33:14pm
re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Thank you for the iDutch lesson, Jan Simon. You said,

"First of all, uiver is not old Dutch for stork. It is a dialect word (East Netherlands as a matter of fact) where the official word is "ooievaar". "



The Uiver was the first American airliner purchased by KLM, which used the spelling "Uiver" in all of its Dutch language references to the aircraft, as did Dutch citizens in Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies who posted mail carried by the Uiver. This Dutch Uiver crash cover shown below includes "Uiver" in manuscript and in the rubber-stamp cachet (circled in yellow). I wonder why the "ooievaar" spelling wasn't used.

Image Not Found

Bob




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Jansimon
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01 Aug 2016
02:20:38am

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

The reason for this is rather simple. At the time the KLM named all its airplanes after birds, based on the last letter of the plane's registration code. PH-AIP thus became "Pelikaan" and PH-AJU was dubbed "Uiver". It was a forced choice because there were no common birds starting with U.

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Jansimon
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01 Aug 2016
02:32:27am

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

@ Richard:
The situation has changed a bit. Nowadays almost all children's programmes on tv are dubbed. Something that was unthinkable just 15 years ago. Even a lot of the big films in cinemas that are for "all ages" are dubbed. An abomination to those who remember how it was, but most children do not know better. There are also more Dutch films and tv programmes so the exposure to (American) English has become less. At least from that source. I work for an internationally operating company and it hurts the ears when some of the colleagues start talking "Dunglish" (English spoken with a heavy Dutch accent and with sentences and idiom litterally taken from Dutch, which is unintentionally funny).
In my experience Germans and Scandinavians have a much better command of the English language. The Dutch only think they speak it well.
At least that is my opinion.

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okstamps
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01 Aug 2016
10:55:40am
re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Jan-simon,

From your description, things have really changed. Also, my recollection is of my fellow Dutch employees of having a very good handle on both speaking and writing English. The same was true of the people working in stores and shops, their English seemed to be nearly perfect with little accent (at least to the ears of an American from the Midwest).

One of the young Dutch chemists that I worked with at the time said that those who didn't speak English ended up working in bicycle shops. I guess the reasoning was that only Dutch-speaking people would frequent those shops. Since I didn't have a car and did my commuting, shopping and local travel by bicycle, I had to frequent some of the local bicycle shops. And that was about the only place I came into contact with younger people who had no knowledge of English.

From having to deal with people from around the world as part of my job (providing technical support for the products that were used in our operations), I had much more difficulty in speaking to people from Latin America, many areas in Africa and from South Asia. In Latin America the problem was people learning English at a later age, while many areas of Africa and South Asia have sort of developed their own versions of English (and English pronunciation) much like North American English now is quite different than British English. To me, understanding someone from Nigeria speaking to me on the phone was nearly impossible (face-to-face was usually not a problem, so we must rely upon a visual component in our verbal communications more than realized).

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cdj1122
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..

01 Aug 2016
11:26:55am
re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Dealing with people who insist on using their somewhat incomprehensible native language reminds me of an incident I still laugh about.( Une blague, mes amis. )
After leaving Istanbul in 1964 the ship stopped in Beirut, Tripoli and Tunis. At some point I came down with a stomach infection and the ship's port agent had an assistant take me to a medical clinic, probably the cheapest available.
We communicated using my faulty high school French, the assistant's faulty English, a receptionist's French and Arabic and the doctor's Arabic, which may have been a different dialect. (because several times she wrote something on the edge of a paper and he read it, before nodding ) All this back and forth, many hand gestures, mingled with a few pokes and probes in a partly curtained alcove where the idea of modesty or privacy seemed to have never developed.
Fortunately I lived..

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".... You may think you understood what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you think you heard is not what I thought I meant. .... "
Jansimon
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01 Aug 2016
04:38:04pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Richard,
At my previous job one of the tasks that somehow landed with me was proof reading all the English and German texts before they were publicized. Most of the time, these writings were very poor in grammar and spelling. More often than not those who wrote the prose had university education. It often cost me a lot of time to clean them up, and I suppose some of my scepticism toward my countrymen's language skills must have its origin in this experience.

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philb
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01 Aug 2016
07:55:42pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

i took this without permission..its probably hard to make out...i was told i should have said old fashioned Dutch not old Dutch !Image Not Found

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Bobstamp
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01 Aug 2016
11:24:27pm
re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Thank you, Jan Simon! Your explanation about the Uiver's spelling makes perfect sense! And now I understand how most Dutch people I speak with about the Uiver at first don't understand me, first because my pronunciation is terrible! When I explain further, their eyes always light up and sometimes they have tell me how they spell it — ooievaar — but no one has ever offered an explanation of the spelling.

I first learned about the Uiver when my Dutch friend, Ben Guilliamse, asked me if I could do some research for him about this crash cover, which his father had mailed from Groningen to a friend in Java. One of the first things I "learned," from the American Airmail Catalogue, 5th edition as I recall, was that the aircraft had crashed in North Africa, and (if I recall correctly) that there were survivors. Wrong on both counts!

Image Not Found

Since then, I've learned a great deal about the Uiver and its crash in Iraq, which in a literal sense left Netherlands in mourning as much for the four crewmen and three passengers as for the aircraft itself, which had came to represent Netherlands itself on the international stage when it placed first in the handicap portion of the MacRobertson International Air Race from Amsterdam to Melbourne. Here's a photograph in my collection, showing the Uiver as it was landing in Melbourne; note the flaps, the first ever used on an airliner.

Image Not Found

One interesting facet of my journey in learning about the Uiver has been that every Dutch person I've talked with about the aircraft has known about it, even though it's now been 82 years since it first flew and then a few weeks later crashed. Mind you, I don't think I've ever talked face-to-face with any Dutch-Canadians younger than myself!

Bob






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malcolm197

03 Aug 2016
04:24:43pm
re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

I am surprised to hear that the pronunciation of English by Dutch people appears to have deteriorated.

My contacts with people from the Netherlands come from working in a Scout Hostel in London in late 60s/early 70s and camping in Europe with my young family shortly after.

The majority of Dutch people I came into contact with spoke perfect English ( much better than some English people I know ). The accent was noticeably "mid - Atlantic", but idiomatically it was very much British English.

The piece-de-resistance was on a camp site in France when my young sons brought over a young girl of about 9 or 10 whom they had met on the playground, and she introduced herself as Dutch in perfect English, and proceeded to chat along colloquially for about half an hour. I must have looked a complete idiot as I am sure my jaw had dropped so far as to be scraping the ground !

Malcolm

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philb
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03 Aug 2016
05:15:25pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

My wifes "school education" in Holland ended at age 15,but the nuns had taught the kids Dutch,French,English and German.

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philb

30 Jul 2016
09:41:49pm

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I was looking through some Dutch Indies covers when my CURIOUS wife started reading this 1819 cover from a coffee grower in Paramaribo ..the dealer says he gave it to her..but i have a feeling it was tagged on my bill. It will be fun for her to interpret the 1819 Dutch !Image Not Found

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Bobstamp

31 Jul 2016
01:43:20pm

re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

If it can be translated! I understand that Old Dutch and New Dutch are very different animals. A Dutch-speaking friend of mine gave me a great deal of help with one of my projects, about the crash of the Dutch KLM DC-2 Uiver in Iraq in 1934. Uiver in Old Dutch meant Stork. Today it doesn't exist as a word, or so I've been told. As an aside, my friend, Ben Guilliamse, who died when his plane crashed in Prince George, BC several years ago, explained to me that it's easy to speak Dutch. All you have to do is speak English with your mouth full of finishing nails! Day Dreaming

I think that one of the interesting aspects of philately is that it's not difficult or expensive to hold fascinating documents in your hands that other people created, held in their hands, and read long before our time. Some covers in my collection include personal letters with descriptions of the London Blitz and mentions of the impact of the Battle of the Atlantic on Brits, a complaint about unnecessary training deaths after the war, and even a brief description of the sound of guns at the Front in France in 1917. One poignant cover was sent to a Canadian tank crewman in 1944, but returned marked "DECEASED". He was killed the day after last day of the Battle of Falaise, in which a large proportion of the German army was destroyed in a pincer movement by Canadian, British, Polish, and American armies.

Bob

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philb

31 Jul 2016
02:40:01pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Bob, perhaps thats why the Dutch dictionary is tiny compared to the English. I think the Dutch language has changed twice since my wifes mother was born. I go by "stampcollector" but i am really a postal history nut..i rarely buy a stamp at a stamp show. I know most if not all of the covers the dealers mark one dollar,five dollars or fifteen are not worth nearly that much....but if you want them ..you pay. The dealer finds the item however he does...he pays for the table he sits at..so i guess he can ask what he wants for an item .

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Jansimon

31 Jul 2016
03:42:06pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

I have to step in now, for at least three reasons.
First of all, uiver is not old Dutch for stork. It is a dialect word (East Netherlands as a matter of fact) where the official word is "ooievaar".

Secondly, 19th century Dutch is not considered Old Dutch. It is different from modern Dutch, that is true, but mostly in style and in spelling. Any Dutchman can read 19th century prose or other texts, but most will find it weird, because the way things are said just change. But that's the same for English. Jane Austen's novels or even Shakespeare are not considered Old English, or are they? Beowulf - that's old English (and probably closer to old Dutch and Frisian than to modern English, but that would be another story).

Finally, as a Dutchman I must protest against the dictionary remark. The official Dutch dictionary, the WNT or "Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal" is (start Wiki-quote): "The largest monolingual dictionary in the world, it contains over 450,000 entries for Dutch words from 1500 to 1921. The paper edition consists of 43 volumes (including three supplements), almost 50,000 pages. The dictionary was almost 150 years in the making; the first volume was published in 1864, and the final volume was presented to Albert II of Belgium and Beatrix of the Netherlands in 1998." I rest my case Big Grin

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philb

31 Jul 2016
04:39:45pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

i give up !

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okstamps

31 Jul 2016
05:51:17pm

re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

As an American who spoke no language other than English, I accepted a work-related transfer to The Netherlands in 1997 to a small research center that my company had established just outside of Leiden (between Amsterdam and Rotterdam). My company had operations world-wide and required all employees to communicate in English (which included all written communication), so getting along at work was no problem. I was very curious, however, how well I would be able to get along outside of work.

I was surprised to find out that almost everyone in The Netherlands is at least bilingual, with English universally understood along with Dutch. I quickly understood why this was the case as it seemed that about half of the television programs were in English and all the movies were in English. No dubbing of the native language over the English as you find in Germany or France, just Dutch subtitles on the bottom of the screen. And these were all American television shows and American movies, so the Dutch spoken English is with much more of an American accent than with a British accent.

This came in very handy for me as I was able to catch all the latest American movie releases in the local theaters. I never had a television to pick up the local television signals (they are different than the American standard, so my American television did not work). What interested me, however, was which television shows were shown. Of all the American television shows to pick from, the two that I noticed specifically were Rosanne and The Jerry Springer Show. One day at work one the Dutch secretaries came over to me and asked, "I was watching Jerry Springer last night, and are all you Americans like that?" What a great way to portray American culture and Americans in general!

I was 40 years old when I transferred over. I had always heard that it became progressively more difficult to learn a new language as one gets older, and after my 2+ years in The Netherlands, I could not agree more. As an attempt to learn Dutch, I enrolled in a university night class that taught Dutch to native English speakers. Before the first night's lesson was complete, however, I knew that I was not going to do well. The instructor started the lesson by going through the alphabet pronouncing it in Dutch. When she got to "V" and "W", I had to stop her and ask her to repeat those letters since I could not distinguish any difference when I heard them. She did a couple of times and got a bit exasperated when I still couldn't differentiate the two. I dropped the class a couple of weeks later when I realized that this just wasn't going to work out for me.

Dutch is very difficult to pronounce. While German is guttural, Dutch is much more so. As much as I tried, whenever I tried to speak anything in Dutch, from a place name to a simple phrase, none of the Dutch that I worked with claimed that they could understand me. So I just gave up after a time.

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philb

31 Jul 2016
06:40:02pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

When we go over and i talk to my nephews in their 20's they do not miss a beat..they are up to all the current young people slang..at one time they spoke a correct England type English but now the media has corrupted them !Happy

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Bobstamp

31 Jul 2016
08:33:14pm

re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Thank you for the iDutch lesson, Jan Simon. You said,

"First of all, uiver is not old Dutch for stork. It is a dialect word (East Netherlands as a matter of fact) where the official word is "ooievaar". "



The Uiver was the first American airliner purchased by KLM, which used the spelling "Uiver" in all of its Dutch language references to the aircraft, as did Dutch citizens in Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies who posted mail carried by the Uiver. This Dutch Uiver crash cover shown below includes "Uiver" in manuscript and in the rubber-stamp cachet (circled in yellow). I wonder why the "ooievaar" spelling wasn't used.

Image Not Found

Bob




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Jansimon

01 Aug 2016
02:20:38am

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

The reason for this is rather simple. At the time the KLM named all its airplanes after birds, based on the last letter of the plane's registration code. PH-AIP thus became "Pelikaan" and PH-AJU was dubbed "Uiver". It was a forced choice because there were no common birds starting with U.

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Jansimon

01 Aug 2016
02:32:27am

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

@ Richard:
The situation has changed a bit. Nowadays almost all children's programmes on tv are dubbed. Something that was unthinkable just 15 years ago. Even a lot of the big films in cinemas that are for "all ages" are dubbed. An abomination to those who remember how it was, but most children do not know better. There are also more Dutch films and tv programmes so the exposure to (American) English has become less. At least from that source. I work for an internationally operating company and it hurts the ears when some of the colleagues start talking "Dunglish" (English spoken with a heavy Dutch accent and with sentences and idiom litterally taken from Dutch, which is unintentionally funny).
In my experience Germans and Scandinavians have a much better command of the English language. The Dutch only think they speak it well.
At least that is my opinion.

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okstamps

01 Aug 2016
10:55:40am

re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Jan-simon,

From your description, things have really changed. Also, my recollection is of my fellow Dutch employees of having a very good handle on both speaking and writing English. The same was true of the people working in stores and shops, their English seemed to be nearly perfect with little accent (at least to the ears of an American from the Midwest).

One of the young Dutch chemists that I worked with at the time said that those who didn't speak English ended up working in bicycle shops. I guess the reasoning was that only Dutch-speaking people would frequent those shops. Since I didn't have a car and did my commuting, shopping and local travel by bicycle, I had to frequent some of the local bicycle shops. And that was about the only place I came into contact with younger people who had no knowledge of English.

From having to deal with people from around the world as part of my job (providing technical support for the products that were used in our operations), I had much more difficulty in speaking to people from Latin America, many areas in Africa and from South Asia. In Latin America the problem was people learning English at a later age, while many areas of Africa and South Asia have sort of developed their own versions of English (and English pronunciation) much like North American English now is quite different than British English. To me, understanding someone from Nigeria speaking to me on the phone was nearly impossible (face-to-face was usually not a problem, so we must rely upon a visual component in our verbal communications more than realized).

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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
01 Aug 2016
11:26:55am

re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Dealing with people who insist on using their somewhat incomprehensible native language reminds me of an incident I still laugh about.( Une blague, mes amis. )
After leaving Istanbul in 1964 the ship stopped in Beirut, Tripoli and Tunis. At some point I came down with a stomach infection and the ship's port agent had an assistant take me to a medical clinic, probably the cheapest available.
We communicated using my faulty high school French, the assistant's faulty English, a receptionist's French and Arabic and the doctor's Arabic, which may have been a different dialect. (because several times she wrote something on the edge of a paper and he read it, before nodding ) All this back and forth, many hand gestures, mingled with a few pokes and probes in a partly curtained alcove where the idea of modesty or privacy seemed to have never developed.
Fortunately I lived..

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".... You may think you understood what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you think you heard is not what I thought I meant. .... "
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Jansimon

01 Aug 2016
04:38:04pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Richard,
At my previous job one of the tasks that somehow landed with me was proof reading all the English and German texts before they were publicized. Most of the time, these writings were very poor in grammar and spelling. More often than not those who wrote the prose had university education. It often cost me a lot of time to clean them up, and I suppose some of my scepticism toward my countrymen's language skills must have its origin in this experience.

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philb

01 Aug 2016
07:55:42pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

i took this without permission..its probably hard to make out...i was told i should have said old fashioned Dutch not old Dutch !Image Not Found

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Bobstamp

01 Aug 2016
11:24:27pm

re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

Thank you, Jan Simon! Your explanation about the Uiver's spelling makes perfect sense! And now I understand how most Dutch people I speak with about the Uiver at first don't understand me, first because my pronunciation is terrible! When I explain further, their eyes always light up and sometimes they have tell me how they spell it — ooievaar — but no one has ever offered an explanation of the spelling.

I first learned about the Uiver when my Dutch friend, Ben Guilliamse, asked me if I could do some research for him about this crash cover, which his father had mailed from Groningen to a friend in Java. One of the first things I "learned," from the American Airmail Catalogue, 5th edition as I recall, was that the aircraft had crashed in North Africa, and (if I recall correctly) that there were survivors. Wrong on both counts!

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Since then, I've learned a great deal about the Uiver and its crash in Iraq, which in a literal sense left Netherlands in mourning as much for the four crewmen and three passengers as for the aircraft itself, which had came to represent Netherlands itself on the international stage when it placed first in the handicap portion of the MacRobertson International Air Race from Amsterdam to Melbourne. Here's a photograph in my collection, showing the Uiver as it was landing in Melbourne; note the flaps, the first ever used on an airliner.

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One interesting facet of my journey in learning about the Uiver has been that every Dutch person I've talked with about the aircraft has known about it, even though it's now been 82 years since it first flew and then a few weeks later crashed. Mind you, I don't think I've ever talked face-to-face with any Dutch-Canadians younger than myself!

Bob






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malcolm197

03 Aug 2016
04:24:43pm

re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

I am surprised to hear that the pronunciation of English by Dutch people appears to have deteriorated.

My contacts with people from the Netherlands come from working in a Scout Hostel in London in late 60s/early 70s and camping in Europe with my young family shortly after.

The majority of Dutch people I came into contact with spoke perfect English ( much better than some English people I know ). The accent was noticeably "mid - Atlantic", but idiomatically it was very much British English.

The piece-de-resistance was on a camp site in France when my young sons brought over a young girl of about 9 or 10 whom they had met on the playground, and she introduced herself as Dutch in perfect English, and proceeded to chat along colloquially for about half an hour. I must have looked a complete idiot as I am sure my jaw had dropped so far as to be scraping the ground !

Malcolm

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philb

03 Aug 2016
05:15:25pm

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re: 1819 cover Paramaribo to Amstersdam

My wifes "school education" in Holland ended at age 15,but the nuns had taught the kids Dutch,French,English and German.

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