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Re: Intergermansk

From:René Uittenbogaard <ruittenb@...>
Date:Saturday, January 29, 2005, 2:52
J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 01:38:03 +0100, René Uittenbogaard wrote: > >> 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. > > None of these differences make a language. I mean, I'm speaking a dialect > that is not mutually intellegible with the standard language and differs > from the standard language phonologically, lexically, morphologically and > grammatically.
Well, I guess that my impression of what are strong arguments for a separate language needs adjustment. But anyhow, I just wanted to point out some differences between Afrikaans and Dutch. René