Re: Intergermansk

Ray Brown wrote:
 >
 > On Tuesday, January 25, 2005, at 09:04 , Pascal A. Kramm wrote:
 >
 >> Well, Danish has still more, and Norwegian about as much. I took a
 >> look at
 >> it already (not too easy finding stuff on it), and it seems like a
 >> Dutch dialect to me, with a few grammatical differences...
 >
 > Um - hope we haven't got any Afrikaaner members of the list. I do
 > not think they would agree about its being a "Dutch dialect"  :)
 >
 > I know the distinction between dialect & language is not precisely
 > defined. There are, for example, some people who maintain that
 > Swedish, Norwegian & Danish are not really different languages -
 > merely dialects of 'Continental Scandinavian'. IMO the differences
 > between Dutch & Afrikaans are greater than those between the
 > continental Scandinavian languages.

Dutch and Afrikaans are largely mutually intelligible, but I'd say they
are further apart than dialects, because of (1) the near-lack of
inflections in Afrikaans, and (2) its much further evolved spelling
(e.g. loss of many intervocalic fricatives).

The pronunciation is also quite different: if I hear them correctly,
vowels in Afrikaans are generally more diphthongal, less rounded, and
more central. I guess that therefore it's easier for Dutch people to
read Afrikaans than to understand spoken Afrikaans.

Also there are many "false friends" between Dutch and Afrikaans.
And if a word occurs in both languages, it often happens that the
Afrikaans word is a formal word, while the same word in Dutch can have
the same meaning, but be informal or even slang.


Ray Brown wrote:
 >
 > I have a copy of the opening of the Pater Noster in the 1902 version:
 > Vio fadr hu bi in hevn,
 > holirn bi dauo nam,
 > dauo reik kom,
 > dauo vil bi dun an erd,
 >     as it bi in hevn.

Nice! :) It tastes a bit antique to me (which is a good thing) (hmm,
maybe because of 'bi' which also exists in Middle-Dutch).

Greetings,
René