Re: OT: Afrikaans

En réponse à Tim May :

>A quick question primarily for officiallanguagespeakers - what are the
>main differences between modern Dutch and modern Afrikaans, and what
>degree of mutual intelligibility remains between them?
Check for instance http://www.verbix.com to see the difference between
Dutch and Afrikaans conjugations.

In short, in my experience Afrikaans is creolised Dutch, i.e. with an
extremely simplified grammar (no gender distinction - all nouns use the
article 'de' rather than 'de' or 'het' -, no case distinctions in pronouns,
no number distinctions in nouns, etc...). IIRC the sound of the language is
a bit different too (Afrikaans IIRC has [g] for 'g' rather than [x]).
Finally, there are quite a few differences in vocabulary. As for syntax, I
seem to remember that Afrikaans got rid of the verb-final rules of Dutch.
The result is, in my experience (and I have two white South-African
colleagues who are L1 speakers of Afrikaans), that Afrikaans speakers don't
understand much of Standard Dutch when spoken (I know that because one of
my South-African colleagues took the same Dutch course as me, and still
doesn't have the understanding of Dutch that I have. Written Dutch is much
easier for him than for me though), but Dutch speakers do understand quite
a lot of Afrikaans (especially when they know a bit of Dutch dialects
themselves, not only ABN and their own dialect). According to my Dutch
colleagues, it does indeed sound a bit like "baby-Dutch", i.e. simplified
but understandable. To me, it always sound at the edge of intelligibility.
I guess my command of Dutch is not good enough yet :))) .

Funny, it's a case where intelligibility exists, but only in one direction
:)) . I wonder how dialectologists handle such cases :))) .

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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