The plans for the dyke originally included a railway line. This never happened, but the idea has resurfaced frequently in the past century.
The Afsluitdijk was also a defensive structure, part of the defence of Holland (the collective name of the two provinces that are home to the government and a large part of the population). When the Germans invaded, the Afsluitdijk fortress with its concrete fortifications (called kazematten) and strategically advantageous position actually held, i.e., it never fell under combat, despite attempts to overtake it. The Germans went round the other side of the IJsselmeer and the Netherlands capitulated before the Wehrmacht could take the position.
The Kazematten museum on the dyke can be visited, and should appeal to all military aficionados.
For another size reference: traversing it takes about 20 minutes. 20 minutes of nothing but water on both sides. It's quite a surreal drive the first time.
Currently the afsluitdijk is undergoing a major upgrade. The hydraulic tests (scale 1:2) have just about been concluded. Unfortunately not too many videos are public, but found this short one https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=58W6870d1PM
The afsluitdijk allows for saline sea water right next to clean fresh water due to the rivers ending in the ijselmeer displacing the seawater form the inland sea. I wish the Dutch government would fund projects like redstack which try to generate energy from the saline difference on the afsluitdijk while they renew things. It seems so much easier to do both infrastructures at once (redstack and blue energy as a whole is still expirimental though).
In the Netherlands a lot of houses are sitting on wooden poles that stand on sand plates below the surface. The problem we have right now is drought. As long as wood sits below the water it will not rot. But since we had some very dry years the water levels in the ground have gone down and the wood might start to rot and attract fungi.
Even today willow branch mats are still used. They are used primarily for support structures during construction so durability is not always an issue (though of course submerged wood lasts pretty long anyways).
When I visited Amsterdam I saw these ancient looking witch's brooms everywhere- when they clean the streets, it's guys with witch's brooms in front of modern cleaning trucks. I talked to a number of people who said they worked better than the modern style (and indeed, watching the cleaners do their job, it was clear the witch's broom excelled at reaching into tiny corners and pulling out things before the truck came through).
> The Afsluitdijk (Dutch: [ˈɑfslœydɛik] English: "Enclosure Dam") is a major dam and causeway in the Netherlands. It was constructed between 1927 and 1932 and runs from Den Oever in North Holland province to the village of Zurich in Friesland province, over a length of 32 kilometres (20 mi) and a width of 90 metres (300 ft), at an initial height of 7.25 metres (23.8 ft) above sea level.
Would engineering be able to keep up with something like Meltwater Pulse 1A [1], when sea level rose at 50mm/year? Could climate change cause another pulse like that?
Interesting fact is that Hendrik Lorentz, the Nobel prize winning physicist, did much of the calculations on how the tide would affect the structure. Based on his calculations the structure was moved to a spot were the movement of the water would have less of an influence.
It’s quite a feat of math and engineering considering that no computers were available to do real simulations.
This. That is why people here prefer to go at it together. They’ve been joining forces for centuries to battle the water. (Next to the Afsluitdijk is the “Oude Bildtdijk“. It was made in the year 1500.
I've done the Friesland->Noord Holland direction once against a force 5 wind and I distinctly remember wishing for that bus to come into existence so there you have it :)
(This was 30 years ago or so).
I cycled around the lake inside 24 hours, it was quite the trip.
I don't think the renovation will be very expensive. The creation was, but it was the first step in creating a shitton of land, and also the first step in protecting a lot of coast from storm surges.
What about it makes it sound like a keyboard model? As a Dutchman I'm having a hard time ignoring the real meaning and seeing what keyboard related thing it resembles in English.
It even uses 7/9 QWERTY home row letters (asdfjkl) and only three non-home-row letters (tui, all from the top row). That feels very credible as keyboard-mashing output!
Hehe okay. Not sure it's mentioned anywhere: it consists of two words (similar to English compound words like "sundial"): afsluit and dijk, where dijk pronounced similar to dike and means the same. Afsluit is less close to English and means "enclosure". The enclosure dike.
Wikipedia says "enclosure dam", which is more accurate since a dam has water on two sides, as the afsluit-dijk does, but that's not what we call it in Dutch. Then it would have been afsluitdam -- yes, dam and dam are the same in Dutch and English, just like dike and dijk are very similar. Wonder why! :-)
Edit: not sure why you're being downvoted?! I always find it rude when people downvote without comment (also on stackoverflow, I typically comment when I see it on my own or someone else's posts).
As a native English speaker with Dutch colleagues, I've always thought Dutch was remarkably close. Once you kinda figure out pronunciation patterns a lot of it is very similar. Written Dutch is the only language I intuitively perceive the cognate rrelationships with.
Supposedly we are the second-closest language to English linguistically (I'm not sure by what measure - I'm not a linguist). Only Frisian, which has many similarities to Old English, is closer.
I don't know what the -sta suffix means, aside from that it's a last name suffix (Hoekstra comes to mind, a last name which could be translated as corner-stra or angle-stra). It's not very common though and I can't think of any other -stra names. My first thought is that someone named Dijkstra historically constructed dikes, but then Hoekstra constructed... corners or angles?! Unless hoek had a different meaning in the middle ages, that can't be it.
Speaking of Dutch engineering feats, I realise now that we kind of dodged a bullet there in terms of pronunciation. The mutex could easily have been called the afsluitdijkstra ;-)
The english "out" is pronounced like the dutch "oud". Would you say "oud" and "uit" are the same? An afslouddijk sounds different from an afsluitdijk. The english "oid" (as in humanoid) I think is closer to our "uit" sound than "out" would be.
Disclaimer: don't speak Dutch; no training in Dutch; going solely off of wikipedia.
Wikipedia tells us that Dutch "ui" is the diphthong /œy/ and "ou" is the diphthong /ɑu/. The English MOUTH vowel is conventionally /aʊ/ in American pronunciation, and the CHOICE vowel is conventionally /ɔɪ/. I will analyze them as if they were /au/ and /ɔi/.
It's clear that the MOUTH vowel is the best available English match for Dutch "ou". The difference between [a] and [ɑ] is minimal.
Dutch "ui" is trickier. /œy/ starts with a front vowel, which isn't true of /au/ or /ɔi/. /ɔ/ is a better match in terms of vowel height. (According to the notation. This is a case where you're probably better off just listening to samples; vowel notation is quite sloppy.)
/y/ is the high front rounded vowel, a sound which, like /œ/ (mid-low front rounded), does not exist in English. It has two obvious approximants: FLEECE (/i/), the high front unrounded vowel, and GOOSE (/u/), the high back rounded vowel. If you choose FLEECE, prioritizing the vowel's frontness, you'll end up thinking that "ui" should correspond to the English CHOICE vowel -- the first part of the diphthong has been moved back, and the second part has been unrounded, but compromises have to be made. If you pick GOOSE, then you'll end up on the MOUTH vowel -- in this case, the first part gets moved back and lowered somewhat, and the second part also gets moved back but preserves its lip rounding.
Is either of those choices objectively right? No. You might prefer thinking of "ui" as CHOICE on the grounds that that makes it different from "ou", but that runs into the problem that (according to wikipedia again) Dutch also includes an "oi" diphthong which is a close match to English CHOICE.
You could think of the root of the problem as being that Dutch has three high vowels /i/, /y/, /u/ (spelled "ie", "uu", "oe" among other ways, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_orthography ), where English has only /i/ and /u/. You're going to end up with collisions somewhere.
I guess the 'ui' and the 'g' are hardest to pronounce correctly for non-native Dutch speakers.
We have a tongue-twister for German and English people that goes like this "Ik eet uitsluitend gefruite uien in mijn geruite keuken" (you can have Google Translate read it out loud). Meaning is "I only eat fried onions in my checkered kitchen".
> Meaning is "I only eat fried onions in my checkered kitchen".
That sentence is more ambiguous in English than you might think! I'm curious which of these meanings are compatible with the Dutch:
1. The only thing I do in my checkered kitchen is eat fried onions. (Other activities don't take place in the checkered kitchen.)
2. Fried onions are the only thing I eat in my checkered kitchen. (Other foods must be eaten elsewhere.)
3. Fried onions are the only type of onion I eat in my checkered kitchen. (Raw onions must be eaten elsewhere, but eating steak in the kitchen is OK.)
4. My checkered kitchen is the only place in which I eat fried onions. (I'll eat steak anywhere, but I won't eat fried onions outside the kitchen.)
5. My checkered kitchen is the only one of my kitchens in which I eat fried onions. (I'll eat steak in any kitchen, but I won't eat fried onions in my plain white kitchen.)
6. My checkered kitchen is the only checkered kitchen in which I will eat fried onions. (I won't eat fried onions in your checkered kitchen, but I will eat them in the bedroom.)
Ha, that's cool. You found a lot of different interpretations. These also exist in Dutch. No. 3 comes closest to how most people would understand the meaning in Dutch, but some others like no. 4 would fit too.
I read it as having meaning #2 but it depends on the intonation and context. If you emphasize fried then it's #3. If we're talking about having fried onions and not in your kitchen I'd probably assume #4.
Number 4 would be "Ik eet gefruite uien uitsluitend in mijn geruite keuken", though.
It mostly gets confusing for me because of moving back and forth between English and Dutch grammar, but any bit of context would make it a lot less ambiguous :)
Most things germans try to pronounce are just way off in general (living in germany, the topic comes up regularly), but by far the worst seems to be the sch as in Scheveningen or schatje. It usually turns into skatje and since that isn't a soft sound they morph it into an angry word to make fun of how our word for sweetie sounds after morphing.
I must admit that this is a little beyond me and I don't really understand what you're trying to say. Do I understand correctly that you're saying the vowel in choice is the best match for the Dutch "ui" when going off of the IPA notation, but that there exists no good match in English like there is for "ou"?
I'm saying that (1) there is no perfect or near-perfect match; (2) it isn't clear which available option is the "best" match, because the three obvious options each sacrifice something different.
If you're interested in the theory:
Vowels are generally thought of as being points in a three-dimensional space. The dimensions are:
1. Whether the vowel is high or low -- if your mouth opens wide (chin closer to feet), it's a lower vowel; if your mouth doesn't open far (chin closer to eyes), it's a higher vowel.
2. Whether the vowel is front or back. The traditional way to explain this to linguistics students is to give them all lollipops. You put the lollipop on the middle of your tongue with the stick jutting out of your mouth. You can observe that the stick juts farther forward when you're pronouncing the FLEECE vowel than it does when you're pronouncing the GOOSE vowel.
3. Whether, as you pronounce the vowel, your lips are rounded or not.
Dutch "ui" is a diphthong, a transition from one vowel to another vowel. It appears to be a transition from (lowish, front, rounded) to (high, front, rounded). This is difficult for English because, in English, all front vowels are unrounded.
If you'd like to preserve the lip-rounding aspect of "ui", you need to use back vowels, at which point the MOUTH vowel is a near-perfect (low, back, xx[1]) -> (high, back, rounded) match.
If you'd like to preserve the frontness of "ui", the English FACE vowel is available, which is a transition from (lowish, front, unrounded) to (high, front, unrounded). CHOICE is a different option; it's (lowish, back, rounded) -> (high, front, unrounded). With CHOICE, you're choosing to match the rounding (and not the frontness) of the beginning of "ui", but transition into an end that matches frontness instead of rounding.
Which part of a sound is more important for purposes of matching a foreign sound to a native sound is a very interesting question, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has any idea why different languages make the choices they do. My (American) ears think the MOUTH vowel is the best match for Dutch "ui", even though it's an even better match for Dutch "ou". But someone else might disagree.
For an example of "differential splitting", consider that in modern English, W, V, and F are three separate sounds. In Old English, W and F were "real" sounds ("phonemes"), and V was a variety ("allophone") of F. In modern Mandarin Chinese, W and F are also phonemes, and V is an allophone of... W. Clearly, if you speak modern Mandarin, what's important about the V sound is not the same thing that would be important if you spoke Old English.
[1] Rounding is less obvious for low vowels -- a certain amount of lip rounding is induced by opening your mouth so far.
That was actually very interesting! I understand what you are saying now (admittedly I first thought "more theory? Not sure", probably because I had a very hard time following your last comment). I actually get it now and feel like I learned something new. Thanks for that write-up!
As for
> My (American) ears think the MOUTH vowel is the best match for Dutch "ui",
I personally stand by my choice of the CHOICE vowel also after reading your comparison of the different options, but it's definitely a close contest.
W, V and F are also separate sounds in Dutch, but much closer to each other than in English. Wat, vat and fat are different words. The Dutch W is not bilabial like the English W, but just a "softer" version of the V. (In practice, V is often pronounced almost the same as F).
Thinking about it some more, you can get more easily away with the "eh" in MEH (not the /ə/ but the /ɛ/). That way you'll sound like someone speaking with a The Hague accent, and if you're otherwise speaking English, this will most probably slip by completely unnoticed to most Dutch listeners (unlike OU or OI would).
That's my point ;) I think ui sounds more like the English oi than like the English/Dutch ou. I'm not sure there exists a word in English that contains the ui sound as we know it.
Sluice is a direct cognate to Dutch sluis, with the same meaning. The sluit in Afsluitdijk comes from a verb meaning "to close", which is indeed also cognate, but much more distantly: sluiten is inherited from a Germanic root sleutaną, but sluice/sluis comes from Latin exclūdō; both originate from Proto-Indo-European (s)kleh₂w- "hook, peg, nail", which has many descendants, from the Latvian verb for "to become" (via a meaning "to bend") and the Russian for "walking stick" to English cloister or French clé "key".
This post is in the front page of HN because of this initial confusion. Otherwise that was no larger deal compared to other projects that are going on around the world.
What's the confusion here? The site makes pretty clear it's about an engineering project, doesn't it?
And there's plenty of cool about this project, from the reusable kingsize lego-like blocks used to strengthen the dike, to the meandering river for fish passing throuh the dike. There's also a VR video.
The passage for fish is highly needed. Eels are almost extinct in the Netherlands. The adults are inside the country in sweet water, but they cannot get out due to sluices and pump stations. They get slaughtered there.
They need to get out to sea to make a journey to make offspring. That offspring sometimes gets caught in France on the way back, where it is grown and sold in the Netherlands. Fishing results from IJsselmeer can also be found in shops but they are not easy to catch anymore. I would think, for statistic reasons, the caught eels in France might be more sustainable than catching grown eels in the IJsselmeer. The real solution is to work out better sluices and pump stations, so fish can pass again.
The plans for the dyke originally included a railway line. This never happened, but the idea has resurfaced frequently in the past century.
The Afsluitdijk was also a defensive structure, part of the defence of Holland (the collective name of the two provinces that are home to the government and a large part of the population). When the Germans invaded, the Afsluitdijk fortress with its concrete fortifications (called kazematten) and strategically advantageous position actually held, i.e., it never fell under combat, despite attempts to overtake it. The Germans went round the other side of the IJsselmeer and the Netherlands capitulated before the Wehrmacht could take the position.
The Kazematten museum on the dyke can be visited, and should appeal to all military aficionados.