I wrote:
> "Mijn cameraatje is mijn beste kameraatje." :-)
Then Ingemar Uvhagen wrote:
>Looks like Swedish, a bit anyway (perhaps with some imagination). Must
>take a guess (a wild guess?). Does it means "My camera is my best
>buddy/friend."?
Almost got it right; the additions "je"and "tje" are used in Dutch to
indicate small, tiny, cute. So it's "My cute little camera (must have been
describing an OM :-) is my best little pal". The funny thing is that in the
70's and 80's it was considered 'hip' to replace hard-pronounced c's like
in 'camera' with 'k's, so it became 'kamera' (hence the name Kamera Express
for that post order cy.). That word may still seem acceptable, untill you
use it's 'tiny' form, so that 'cameraatje' becomes 'kameraatje'. 'Kameraat'
means 'pal'. Both words are emphasized differently, but in print this
obviously doesn't show.
So I also could have written it, to totally conceile its meaning: "Mijn
kameraatje is mijn beste kameraatje". I recently encountered this weird
quirk of the Dutch unconsistent spelling of the last 2 decades when I
ordered a test from the Dutch magazine F+D of the OM-3 and OM-2Sp,
published in 1985; they actually used the word 'kameraatje' for
'cameraatje'. They also mutulated 'maximaal' (maximal) into 'maksimaal'.
Yuck! A few years ago this alternative spelling was officially abolished in
the so called 'new spelling'. Unfortunately now we have a situation where
nobody above 30 knows how words like 'pannekoekenhuisje' or
'hottentottententententoonstellingkje' are written :-)
Hans
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