In this thread, scheveningen was given as one word that Dutch Resistance fighters used during WWII to identify German spies – the theory being that Germans could not reproduce the peculiar Dutch pronunciation. My mother, a resistance fighter herself, had told me of another word, but I had forgotten it. I made my annual Christmas visit to San Diego, and asked her. She tells me she remembers using two, one of which she couldn’t recall, but the other was schilderijen (I thought it had a [ui] sound, but I guess not). I don’t know what it means, but it’s a tricky one and no mistake. I’ll ask her Sunday whether her other shibboleth is scheveningen.
Nametag, did you have a question, here? Or had you intended to post this in a different Forum?
‘Schilderijen’ means: ‘paintings’, Nametag. Same hard GGG after the S as in Scheveningen.
The ‘ij’ is used as one letter here and sound a bit like the German ‘ei’ in ‘Mein’.
I can’t think of the ‘ui’ sound the resitance would use. Perhaps ‘Zuiderzee’?
A nice sentance would be: “Did you see the schilderijen at the Scheveningen museum? Yes, Scheveningen is a sea resort, but not on the Zuiderzee”. [zee=sea]
[The Zuiderzee used to be a sea in the middle of the Netherlands. We made a sweet water lake out of it and it’s now called: ‘IJsselmeer’.] [lake=meer]
Gelukkig Nieuwjaar. [Happy New Year]
I’m not currently in the Netherlands, so I’m not sure it will do much good to look there.
Not that I’ve never been there, mind you, but I find it pays to move around a lot to foil plans to capture me.
Well, it’s a belated answer to the GQ in the link, so I posted it here in a new thread so as to avoid bumping the old one.