Re: OT: Afrikaans

 --- Thomas Leigh skrzypszy:

> Tim May het geskryf:
> > >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?
Well, my impression is that spoken Afrikaans in understandable to a Dutch
person, although it requires some effort and special concentration. Not that I
have much experience with it, though.
Written Afrikaans is not a problem at all. In fact, I could read many pages
without even missing a word.
To my Dutch eyes, Afrikaans looks incredibly funny - which at least partly
explains my weakness for it.

> Afrikaans lacks the sound /z/, and has /s/ instead.
Well, /z/ is a relative newcomer in Dutch too. My guess is that Afrikaans split
off from Dutch before all initial and intervocalic s's switched to z.

> In addition, there are no inflections for person as there are in
> Dutch: Ek is "I am", jy is "you are", hy is "he is"...
True. That is one of those things that make Afrikaans so funny.

BTW You didn't mention one particular feature of Afrikaans that distinguishes
it from Dutch: the double negation.

> > Christophe het geskryf:
>
> > In my experience Afrikaans is creolised Dutch, i.e. with an
> > extremely simplified grammar
Afrikaans is essentially Dutch with English grammar.

> > As for syntax, I
> > seem to remember that Afrikaans got rid of the verb-final
> > rules of Dutch.
>
> Afrikaans puts participles and modals and stuff at the end of
> clauses all the time like Dutch does, but I don't know the rules
> for this in either language, so I don't know if they are the
> same or different.
No, as far as I can tell, there are only small differences in word order, if
any.

Jan

=====
"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones

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