Re: OT: Afrikaans

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?
There are a bunch of phonetic changes, mostly to do with vowel
changes and lost consonants.

Dutch long /e:/ and /o:/ become diphthongs /i@/ and /u@/ in
Afrikaans. Afrikaans has also developed long open /E:/ and /O:/
(written [ê] and [ô]), which I don't think exist in Dutch. Also
the diphthong written ui is something like /{y/ in Dutch (at
least that's how it sounds to me), whereas in Afrikaans both
elements are fully rounded, /2y/ or something close. Note that
Afrikaans writes as y the diphthong which Dutch writes as ij.

Dutch intervocalic g and d are often lost in Afrikaans, e.g. oog
"eye" > plural oë, Dutch ogen/oogen (sp?); Afrikaans môre
(morning) = Dutch morgen. Note that the Dutch inflection -en is
just -e in Afrikaans, the n being completely lost (as happens in
Dutch pronunciation, but they still write it). Sometimes a final
consonant disappears but reappears when an inflection is added,
e.g. nag "night" > plural nagte; Dutch nacht > nachten (sp?)

Afrikaans lacks the sound /z/, and has /s/ instead.

That's not everything, of course, but I think those are the most
salient differences. Mind you, I know more about Afrikaans than
about Dutch, due to a long standing interest in the former, but
I don't actually speak either beyond a few basic sentences and
niceties.

As far as structure goes, one big difference is in the verbal
system, which Afrikaans has almost completely regularized. The
preterite has disappeared entirely, save for a handful of
auxilliary and modal verbs. The past participle of all verbs,
whether weak or strong in Dutch, is formed simply by prefixing
ge-, except when (a) there is one of those unstressed,
inseparable prefixes on the verb, in which case the ge- is not
added and the past participle is identical to the infinitive, or
(b) if there is a separable prefix on the verb, in which case
the ge- goes inbetween the prefix and the root. But there are
never any vowel changes or added inflections. At least in the
verbal conjugation, that is; some strong past participles have
survived as adjectives (cf. English "I have drunk" vs. "a
drunken man"). 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"...

> Christophe het geskryf:
> In my experience Afrikaans is creolised Dutch, i.e. with an
> extremely simplified grammar
Generally true; though interestingly the formation of plurals
(and the inflected form of adjectives) is IMO more difficult in
Afrikaans than in Dutch due to the sound changes wrought by lost
consonants, etc.

> all nouns use the article 'de' rather than 'de' or 'het'
Die /di/.

And curiously, the indefinite article is written ['n] but
pronounced /@/!

> no case distinctions in pronouns,
There are in some, e.g. ek/my, jy/jou.

> no number distinctions in nouns, etc...).
No, they use plurals just like Dutch or any other Germanic
language. The usual plural ending is -e ( from Dutch -en), but
as I said this often causes changes in the form of the word,
e.g. consonants drop, or dropped consonants reappear, so there
are a lot more apparent irregular plurals than there are in
Dutch.

> IIRC the sound of the language is
> a bit different too (Afrikaans IIRC has [g] for 'g' rather
than [x]).

No, [g] is /x/ in Afrikaans (as is [ch]).

> Finally, there are quite a few differences in vocabulary.
One important consideration in reference to lexicon and idiom is
the pervasive influence of English. You find lost of expressions
which are more or less translated or calqued right out of
English, but put into Afrikaans words.

> 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.

Thomas

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