Re: Intergermansk

On Thursday, January 27, 2005, at 07:56 , J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
[snip]
> I've heard that Netherlands used to be the written language of South
> Africa
> until 1925.
Not exactly - it was English as well as standard Dutch of the Netherlands.
  You have to remember that the Brits finished the 19th century by fighting
a war with the independent Boer states of southern Africa - a war which
Britain provoke basically with the aim of incorporating those states into
its Empire. The Brits defeated the Boers in 1902, By according Dutch
official status in the Union of South Africa Britain was pretending to be
making a gesture to the defeated Boers but in fact knew quite well that it
was humiliating them. Basically, it was saying "You can't even speak and
write your own language properly!"

> Does anybody know why South Africa's top level domain is "za",
> like in Netherlands Zuid-Afrika, whereas it's Suid-Afrika in Afrikaans
It is. I understand these things are regulated by ISO - I recall taking
this matter up with John Cowan sometime in the past, and asking why it was
not 'rsa' (Republic of South Africa - the Afrikkans is similar & the
initials have been used on South african postage stamps. I forget what his
reply was.

But the ZA goes way back into the early years of the 20th cent from the
time when internationally agreed letters were adopted for showing country
of origin of automobiles. I guess in the days of apartheid there was no
impetus on the part of ISO or any other international body to be
accommodating to the government of the RSA. Now the new post-apartheid SA
has eleven official languages - maybe it's a compromise to stick with the
archaic 'za' which corresponds to the country's name in none of its
official languages - I don't know.

> (I guess that "sa" was already taken by another country, but it's strange
> that
> they'd go back to Netherlands)?
I agree - I wish I could remember what John wrote to me.
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On Thursday, January 27, 2005, at 10:12 , J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:

> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:55:42 +0100, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
> wrote:
[snip]
>> This, of course, depends on what one considers the distinction between
>> languages and dialects to be. Unfortunately, the army-and-navy criterion
>> does not work well with Afrikaans, since SA has got a few too many
>> official
>> languages. :)
Only 11   ;)

But that the language has official status in an independent country is
important IMO.

> If we do want to take socio-political factors into account, the facts that
> Afrikaans has a separate written standard from Dutch (Nederlands), and
> that
> it has status as one of the official languages of the Union of South
> Africa
> would seem strongly suggestive of it being a separate language.
Absolutely!

> I just wanted to point out that it's not because of any of the linguistic
> features René Uittenbogaard had mentioned that Afrikaans is considered a
> separate language. I just forgot to mention that I definitely would
> consider
> it a separate language.
Yes, I agree - it seems to me that regarding it as a "dialect of Dutch" is
akin to regarding Swedish, Norwegian and Danish as "Scandinavian dialects"
.

Ray
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http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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"If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything
can change into anything"
          Yuen Ren Chao, 'Language and Symbolic Systems"

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