We ask him what Bartje’s most famous sentence is. “I don’t pray for beans” the chatbot answers correctly. Then the robot tells us more about who Bartje is. But if you type in the statement yourself, you get something completely different. “A Dutch saying. That means that someone does not feel like doing something that is or seems unpleasant,” Tieck reads with a laugh. “It is great for Bartje that it has become a Dutch saying, but it is a pity that there is no reference to Bartje himself at all.”
You can also ask the robot to translate a piece of text into Drents. What is striking is that the text contains different kinds of dialects. “Words from Southwest or South Drenthe, such as an ‘e’ before the past participle. But also the word dail (sharing) occurs, and you see that again in the northeast corner of Drenthe. We see two variants in one sentence. Very special,” says Tieck.
But can you actually learn Drents via the chatbot? Tieck is clear: that is not possible. “It’s very nice for the general rules, but it’s not consistent. This is not how a Drenthe talks. The sentence structure is very Dutch, it’s almost a literal translation. No, a chatbot cannot yet produce Drenthe,” she notes clearly.
Incidentally, the chatbot does learn. Drents has improved in recent weeks. So who knows how it will be in a while. But until then, it’s especially nice to have fun with it for a few hours…