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Dutch Much of English is made up of words from other languages, and Dutch is a significant contributor in this respect, especially through seafaring and commerce and through colonies established in North America, southern Africa, and in what is now Indonesia.
Dutch maritime traditions introduced English to many nautical terms, from the command avast (an alteration of Dutch hou'vast, a shortening of houd vast "hold fast") to the yacht (from obsolete Dutch jaghte, a shortening of jaghtschip "chasing ship"), by way of boom ("beam at the bottom of a sail"), cruise, marline, skipper, and taffrail. Well-traveled Dutch-speakers described the dune (immediately from French, but ultimately from Middle Dutch), iceberg, maelstrom, and reef. Individual fish are identified by Dutch names - lumpfish (from Middle Dutch lumpe "cod"), whiting - as is the collective school and the walrus. Dutch transported words from the languages of far-off lands: from Malay, for example, bamboo, cockatoo, and gingham (from Malay genggang "striped"), and from Arabic monsoon (obsolete Dutch monssoen, via Portuguese monção from Arabic mawsim "season").
In the earliest period of borrowings, the source is often identified more generally as Low German, the group of West Germanic languages and dialects to which Dutch belongs (as indeed does English). Among early words specified as from Dutch are: (from the 13th century) booze and marten; (from the 14th) bundle, curl, dam, Dutch itself, groove, rack, scum, and spout; (from the 15th) bung, croon, mart, prop, snack, and wagon.
After the medieval period Dutch continued to penetrate all areas of English vocabulary, but one distinct strand relates to art: easel and landscape, for example, recorded in the late 16th century; etch and sketch, recorded in the mid-17th. Other areas include: cold-weather activities, for example, skate, sled, and sleigh; food and drink, for example, advocaat, brandy (originally brandy-wine, from Dutch brandewijn "burned (i.e. distilled) wine"), coleslaw, and rijsttafel (a Dutch meal of Indonesian origin); arms and the military, for example, blunderbuss (an alteration of Dutch donderbus "thunder gun"), cashier ("dismiss somebody from the armed forces because of misconduct"), tattoo ("call to soldiers to return to quarters," from Dutch taptoe "shut the tap, i.e. of the beer barrel," a signal at closing time in taverns), and trigger. One Dutch military term whose meaning and origin have been obscured by folk etymology is forlorn hope; this came from Dutch forloren hoop "lost troop," originally "group of soldiers sent on a hopeless mission."
In North America the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, later New York, had a distinct influence on American English. Though now in widespread use, boss was originally a North American term; the geographic feature the bluff is particularly North American, as is the stoop at the entrance to a house (the original Dutch stoep is similarly used in South Africa). Food terms of Dutch origin include cookie, cruller, and waffle. Santa Claus visits children at Christmas because of the Dutch.
Settlers took Dutch to southern Africa in the 17th century. Their descendants were given the name Boer (from Dutch boer "farmer," the source also of boor), and the form of Dutch spoken in southern Africa, known as Cape Dutch, developed into Afrikaans ("African"). Dutch or Afrikaans names were naturally given to unfamiliar animals, birds, and fish (blesbok, dassie, eland, snoek), and to the land's characteristic geographic features (veld). Familiar outside South Africa are apartheid and, no longer particularly associated with the country, commandeer (via Afrikaans kommandeer from Dutch kommanderen "to command"), spoor ("visible trail of an animal"), and trek.
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