Re: Intergermansk

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