Update!
This post unexpectedly showed back up in my feed today, I feel the need to share some further findings made in comments, and clarify my intentions.
Original Post
It came to my attention earlier that the Dutch term for Major League Baseball is Honkbal Hoofdklasse.
Now, for English speakers, this is obviously humorous, because "Dutch is the closest language to English" so you would expect there to be more similarity between the phrases than ball and bal.
Particularly base and honk share exactly zero sounds with each other. Which immediately attracts my interest. It makes sense for the meaning of Major League to be composed equivalently by different words, but the names of sports tend to be somewhat less flexible between languages. Tennis is tennis is tenis is tennis is Теннис is tenis is 테니스 is tennis.
But sometimes different languages focus on different aspects of a sport when choosing what to name it. It is famously true that most languages felt the foot and ball parts of association football were most important, while American English and Japanese chose to focus on the part where this phrase is ridiculously shortened to soccer in Britain.
And, indeed, when it comes to baseball, Japanese highlights different aspects of the game than English does, choosing to render it as 野球 which could be rendered to English reasonably as field sphere, or unreasonably as meadow orb. But 球 is at least a common suffix for ball-based sports, so it is only changing the focus from the bases to the field. Indeed, even in English there was some historical disagreement on whether the primacy of importance lay in the running the bases part (baseball) or the hitting the ball with a stick part (stickball).
So did the people of The Netherlands decide to focus on a different aspect of the game when deciding how to refer to the sport in their language? For an answer, I needed to know what honk means. I decided to try the Nederlands version of Wikipedia.
Quoth wikipedia:
Honk
Honk kan verwijzen naar:
- Honk (honkbal)
- HONK!, een musical gebaseerd op het verhaal van Het lelijke eendje
- Honk (Rolling Stones), een album van The Rolling Stones
- Honk (tijdschrift), een Amerikaans tijdschrift
 |
 Dit is een doorverwijspagina, bedoeld om de verschillen in betekenis of gebruik van Honk inzichtelijk te maken. Op deze pagina staat een uitleg van de verschillende betekenissen van Honk en verwijzingen daarnaartoe. Bent u hier via een pagina in Wikipedia terechtgekomen? Pas dan de verwijzing naar deze doorverwijspagina aan, zodat toekomstige bezoekers direct op de juiste pagina terechtkomen. |
You probably don't need a translation to see that this is a disambiguation page. It turns out Honk can refer to: the Dutch musical "HONK!" (based on the ugly duckling), the Rolling Stones album "Honk", "Honk! magazine" (a defunct competitor to "Mad! magazine"), or honk as in honkbal.
Well that's no help. But it's also a bad sign in my search for meaning that the only item on the disambiguation page that isn't a media product named "Honk" is honk as in honkbal. I don't even know what part of honkbal the honk is, and it turns out that it's only used to refer to the part of honkbal that honkbal is named after?! That doesn't make any sense! You don't name a sport after a word that you made up out of whole cloth to name the sport after! At least not when you didn't invent the sport! And while baseball does have a history prior to American independence, I can find no mention of The Netherlands playing any role in the origin of the sport.
Okay, perhaps google can refer me to someone who knows about dutch etymology honk
Quoth etymologygeek.com:
| Dictionary entry | Language | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| honc | Middle Dutch (dum) | |
| honk | Dutch (nld) | (games) base (safe zone). (somewhat, rare) home, place where one belongs, shelter. |
Well, that's not super helpful, either. It can mean base (as in baseball), or, less commonly, home or shelter, and derives from honc in Middle Dutch no definition given. Now, it does make sense to use shelter to describe the bases in baseball. Which is precisely why they're called bases in English. A base is a location where one can shelter from an enemy, regroup, and make plans before launching further forays. But why use honk when you have the cognate basis right there? Also, this entry marks it's usage to mean "shelter" as rare, but does not so mark its usage in games. With no dates of attestation to judge by, would you not expect the less common usage to have derived from the more common one? Which leaves us at square one.
Perhaps wiktionary can help? Quoth wiktionary
Dutch [ edit ]
Etymology [ edit ]
From Middle Dutch honc , likely through Old Dutch from Proto-Germanic *hank- , *hunk- . Only has cognates in the Frisian languages...
Oh. Okay. So not only do we not know how it derives meaning, we basically have no other languages that we can compare it to for insights.
Or, in other words:
Me: Why is baseball called honkbal in Dutch?
The internet: Why is anything called anything, dude?
Het grappige is dat als Nederlander het best goed te begrijpen is dat baseball vertaald wordt als honkbal, zeker door iemand uit 1900. Een honk is misschien wel een beter omschrijving als een plek om te rusten dan een basis, wat toch een beetje militair klinkt. Maar honk is wel een beetje een oude beschrijving voor een beschutte verzamelplaats.
Daarentegen is het misschien maar goed dat niet te veel mensen ons rare taaltje snappen. Het kan niet de bedoeling zijn dat iedereen snapt wat we in ons koude kikkerlandje aan het doen zijn.
