Advanced Dunglish… the blog
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- After opening a post, you can:
- select various categories such as Punctuation or US-UK issues to find related posts
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A timely reminder
A project can be completed on time, or in good time, or as scheduled. But the nuances of “timely” aren’t always quite the same.
Expertise
Only use this to mean someone’s acquired skill and knowledge in English, not as a term for a valuation or checkup or other professional opinion.
Proximity of verb and subject
Dutch sentence structures can leave a verb and its subject miles apart as some adverbial clause intervenes. A habit that’s best avoided in English.
Some supporting figures
People regularly tell me that they keep hearing natives use the words and phrases I say should be avoided. Which we do; the question is how often. Here are some figures to help back it up.
The verb for spatial positioning: to be
My car is located in the car park. It is placed in the car park. It can be found in the car park. It is positioned in the car park. It stands in the car park. Nope.
Indonesian borrowings
Most words that Dutch and English have borrowed from other European languages overlap, such as Italian musical terms. That doesn’t apply to borrowings from the respective former colonial areas, though.
Cause and effect
“Causing something to take place” isn’t incorrect. But 99 times out of 100, the native speaker would say it was “made to happen”.
Spoken dates
Although we generally say something like “the fifth of November” or “April the seventeenth” (or variants depending on US/UK etc.), it’s not normal to write it out that way.
We suggest to avoid to make this error…
Many cases of an action being expressed in Dutch with an infinitive are more naturally written in English with the “-ing” form.
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