"Loan Oversetting"

(NOTE: When I say "cleansed/ceunde/pure/native English", I refer to the use of English words that are of Germanic origin. They can come through any route (Spanish gave English "ranch" which ultimately derives from Proto-Germanic *hringaz, French gave English "seize" which ultimately derives from Proto-Germanic *sakjaną, Japanese gave English "skinship", and English also inherits many native words from Old English. When I say "cleansed/ceunde/pure/native English", I also refer to words that have been present in English since Old English times, even if they aren't of Germanic origin.)

Hey.

I just wished to ask you, as a Dutch speaker, if Dutch has any particular method of coining words from old roots or forming metaphors that English might lack.

See, I'm a linguistic purist, and I also write poetry in cleansed/ceunde English. Sometimes, I find it difficult to describe something in just pure English. At those times, I look to metaphors.

In this respect, various pidgin languages have come in handy. But sometimes, I like to look to other, fellow Germanic languages for answers. Most oftentimes, I will look to Icelandic, as it is a particularly conservative Germanic language. Other times, I prefer to look to Dutch for answers instead, among other things due to its long trade history with English. Years ago, my delvings into Dutch led to the word "unforstandy" (loan translation of "onverstandig") permanently entering the vocabulary of myself, my family and my friends (albeit with the slightly semantically shifted meaning of "foolish").

Since you are a native speaker of Dutch, I thought to ask you for advice on this matter.

It's probably best to look at the structure of the word first. onverstandig comes from on- (“un-”) + verstandig (“sensible, wise”). The latter in turn derives from verstand (“reason, mind, understanding”), which finally is closely tied to verstaan (“to understand”). So you would need to follow this structure in English too.

However, the first hurdle is already that English uses a slightly different root word, understand. The second is that English does not have a noun paired with this word in the same way that Dutch has, unless you use understanding. But this doesn't allow an adjective to be derived from it in the same way, something meaning "of or related to understanding"... understandingy just doesn't really cut it.

Another approach is to look for synonyms of any of the intermediate steps. Starting from the end, you might translate verstand with mind, and following the process then gives mind(l)y and unmind(l)y. But you can also translate verstandig directly, giving wise, and then of course you simply end up with unwise which is a perfectly good translation of the Dutch onverstandig. :)