Re: Intergermansk

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 01:38:03 +0100, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ren=E9_Uittenbogaard?=
<ruittenb@...> 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.

I've heard that Netherlands used to be the written language of South Africa
until 1925. Does anybody know why South Africa's top level domain is "za",
like in Netherlands Zuid-Afrika, whereas it's Suid-Afrika in Afrikaans (I
guess that "sa" was already taken by another country, but it's strange that
they'd go back to Netherlands)?


>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).
To me, the impression of antiquity is provoqued by the "dauo" which reminds
me of Gothic. It also gives me a feeling of being very close to English,
because of forms like "hu, bi, dun, hevn, fadr, it, as", but this might be
due to my lack of knowledge of other Germanic languages than high
(non-northern) German and English.

kry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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