Upstarting

We were in Brussels just before Christmas for a little holiday, and we visited a couple of lambic breweries while we were there. One of the brewers at Verzet was great and took the time to show us all round it and tell us loads about the process and their beers.

Some of the barrels at the Verzet brewery
(named after their music heroes)

He was talking about the background of the guys who work there, and he said at one point that one of them helped upstarting a brewery, meaning 'helped to start up' a brewery.

In Flemish, there are what's called 'separable verbs'. These correspond to English verbs that have a preposition-like particle as part of it, so in this case start up. The Dutch version is opstarten. You can see that the 'up' part is a prefix, so it's literally 'upstart'. Flemish does have the option of separating that prefix from the main bit of the verb, more like the English equivalent, but it doesn't always separate (based on some rules of what kind of sentence it is). You can see that he basically just anglicised the word (it's called a 'calque' when this happens).

An interesting aside: I say Dutch in the paragraph above because that's what Google Translate has, and I think that the Dutch of Flanders is not different in this respect. Where there is a difference, according to this site,* is exactly when you separate the verb. The verb remains joined together when it's the only verb in the clause, it seems. When there's another verb, as in our sentence (He helped to start up a brewery), it's more likely to be separated in the Netherlands (he helped to start a brewery up) and more likely to remain intact in Flanders (he helped to upstart a brewery).

*If you, like me, like reading about grammar, this seems to be a really comprehensive grammar of Dutch that you can download as a PDF.