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| joziboy | Saturday 08th of October 2005 05:41:23 PM |
| The Dutch-Afrikaans divide - Hey, I was recently in Amsterdam and discovered to my annoyance that I understood very little Dutch (my Afrikaans isn't amazing, but it's good enough). Just how similar are Dutch and Afrikaans? Is it easier for a Dutch person to understand Afrikaans than the other way round because Afrikaans is simpler? The use of the word 'het' seems completely different? In Afrikaans it signifies the past tense or means 'to have', eg Ek het met my kinders gepraat - I spoke with my children Het jy 'n goeie nuwejaar? - Did you have a good new year? What would those phrases, for example, be in Dutch? Dankie vir die hulp! | |
| Mathieu | Saturday 08th of October 2005 07:27:45 PM |
| - Hey joziboy :) I can read Afrikaans with no problems, but yep, there are a few tricky things you have to watch out for; words you just have to memorize because they're not similar - like 'het', as you mentioned. In Afrikaans, it means 'have'. In Dutch, it means 'the' (neuter). So it's a pure coincidence that they appear similar. When you're armed with knowledge af a bunch of these words, it's already a whole lot easier to understand. I think you're right saying Afrikaans is easier for Dutch people to understand than the other way around - I noticed Afrikaans speakers that I wrote with had more difficulty with my language than I with theirs. As for hearing Afrikaans, it sounds like I'm listening to Dutch when I'm really, really tired - when they talk fast it just passes me by completely when I don't concentrate real hard. But in essence I could understand practically every phrase if I had the time and could hear it 2 times. Ek het met my kinders gepraat - Ik heb met mijn kinderen gepraat Het jy 'n goeie nuwejaar? - Heb jij/je een goed nieuwjaar gehad? (heb gehad = have had - maybe in Dutch there's a slight preference for different tenses than in Afrikaans; in a few cases Afrikaans is more likely to use similar tenses to English where Dutch uses another) Dutch is more complicated because verbs show more inflection, there are more irregular verbs, there are gender issues ('goeie'/'goede' for common, 'goed' for neuter) and there are things like stressed and non-stressed pronouns ('jij' vs 'je') - these and a bunch of other features make Dutch more complicated, probably causing that Dutch people can recognize the Afrikaans words (and think: hey, they're making grammar errors), while the other way around it'd be harder. If you have any other questions or phrases you just like to see translated, go ahead :D | |
| joziboy | Saturday 08th of October 2005 09:15:20 PM |
| - Hi Teup, thanks for the help. That's so strange! The difference between goed and goeie in Afrikaans is just the place in the sentence structure: if it comes before the noun then it's goeie, and if it comes after then it's goed. There are no masculine/feminine or neuter (?) words! eg, Dit was a goeie partyjie - maar - Die partyjie was goed Ah, maybe Afrikaans 'het' is equivalent to Dutch 'heb'? So what is the difference between jij and je? And inflection? Haha it must sound like Afrikaans is making a whole lot of grammar mistakes to you! It has a very simple grammar. | |
| Mathieu | Sunday 09th of October 2005 07:20:31 AM |
| - It goes like this: De goeie auto - the good car Een goeie auto - a good car De auto is goed - the car is good Het goeie huis - the good house Een goed huis - a good house Het huis is goed - the house is good Jij is stressed, which means you really mean 'you there' as opposed to someone else, 'je' just means 'you' in the normal sense, when another part of the sentence is what your actual point is about. I posted some more about that in the Dutch grammar topic, there's also a topic concerning gender, the De/het topic, if you're interested. So, since Afrikaans only seems to have the 'jij' ('jy'), it sounds as if they're constantly grabbing your by your collar and make it very clear to YOU that they're talking to YOU. It's as if YOU would capitalize it in English ;) Yep, it's hard for Dutch people to see Afrikaans as it really is, since to us it's hard to take seriously as it sounds much like little kids talk, with typical 'errors' that kids make plus a number of very, very colloquial (dialect) 'mistakes' that became standard in Afrikaans (in Dutch some people (accidentally) say 'bigger as' instead of the official 'bigger than', but Afrikaans has 'bigger as' by default, to name just one example of that sort of thing). Here's a typical verb inflection pattern: Ek spreek, ek het gespreek - I speak, I have spoken Ik spreek, ik heb gesproken - I speak, I have spoken Saying 'gespreek' would sound very childlike to us, though objectively you could just say that Afrikaans has a more regular verb :) | |
| Nostromo | Sunday 09th of October 2005 03:09:56 PM |
| - It seems that 'het'in Afrikaans is a rendering of 'had' (past tense hebben), so that the sentences could be compared as: ek het met my kinders gepraat = ik had met mijn kinderen gepraat. Afrikaans is evidently a Dutch dialect or accent, written down differently with all of its attendant aberrations and quirks. | |
| Mathieu | Sunday 09th of October 2005 06:23:47 PM |
| - Hmm when I enter 'Ek het' on Google I see alot of situations I'd use present tense 'have' ('Ik heb') in Dutch - maybe it's both? | |
| Nostromo | Monday 10th of October 2005 02:44:03 PM |
| - I just made a supposition, it seems likely that the 'd' can become a 't' which has happened so often among Germanic languages. Ik heb trouwens geen kennis van Afrikaans, geen benul... | |
| Mathieu | Thursday 13th of October 2005 02:46:06 PM |
| - Yeah, it must've been derived from either 'had' (had), or 'heeft' (has) - in Afrikaans, 1st person singular also gets this form, and to me it seems more likely for Afrikaans to turn 'heeft' into 'het' than 'had' into 'het', take a look at a another example: Evening: Avond (Dutch) - Aand (Afrikaans) The 'd' survives, and the fricative 'f' is skipped. So, it probably is a form of 'heeft' :) That it happens to end up looking like the same word as the neuter determiner in Dutch is of course pure coincidence, there are more words like that; for example 'vaak', but I can't recall what that was in Afrikaans.. (no time to look up now, gotta rush :p ) | |
| Nostromo | Thursday 13th of October 2005 05:43:58 PM |
| - That seems to me to be a good evaluation of what has occurred. I knew nothing of the Avond/Aand thing, but if that is the case it is very likely to be this. But of course, you're a linguistics guy right?! | |
| joziboy | Thursday 13th of October 2005 09:32:35 PM |
| - Ek weet nie die betekenis van 'vaak' nie. Bedoel jy 'vark'? Is die Nederlandse woord vir aandete (dinner) avondete? :) Apparently the earliest recorded texts in Afrikaans were written in the Arabic alphabet as it was primarily the language of the Malay slaves of the Dutch settlers in the Cape (Kaapstad) - maybe that explains why the 'f' sound (heeft/avond) disappeared? Lost in translation to another alphabet? | |
| Mathieu | Friday 14th of October 2005 07:21:37 PM |
| - [quote][i]Originally posted by Nostromo[/i] But of course, you're a linguistics guy right?![/quote] Haha, that's right, but I know nothing of how etymology really works.. just doing some findings :p [quote][i]Originally posted by joziboy[/i] Ek weet nie die betekenis van 'vaak' nie. Bedoel jy 'vark'? [/quote] 'vaak' means 'often' in Dutch. But in Afrikaans, "Vader ek voel so vaak, asof ek aan die slaap gaan raak" It seems to mean 'tired'.. that must be an archaic Dutch word, since 'Klaas Vaak' is the lepricon that is supposed to put you to sleep :D [quote] Is die Nederlandse woord vir aandete (dinner) avondete? :) [/quote] Almost; it's 'avondeten' :D That end 'n' is also something that seems to be lost in Afrikaans, which is only logical, in Dutch it's not pronounced anyways, so if we would lose Dutch spelling and create a new one today, it wouldn't be written either.. just like the 'z's, would all be 's's now.. [quote] Apparently the earliest recorded texts in Afrikaans were written in the Arabic alphabet as it was primarily the language of the Malay slaves of the Dutch settlers in the Cape (Kaapstad) - maybe that explains why the 'f' sound (heeft/avond) disappeared? Lost in translation to another alphabet?[/quote] Oh, that's interesting, I didn't know that.. yeah, that probably had some influence then.. but I think losing the 'f' is more of a speaking thing, if you say 'avond' fast it sounds like 1 syllable, 'aafnt', and since that's quite a crowded pair of consonants, i guess they just lost one :) Speakers are just lazy in a way, and that's how languages change.. 'Amsterdam' used to be called 'Amstelredam' for example, which is a bit of a tongue twister.. Or another one, Old Dutch for 'and' is "inti" which slowly but surely turned into "ende" into "en" :p | |
| Nostromo | Friday 14th of October 2005 07:58:05 PM |
| - I am an amateur etymologist (very amateur), mostly obsessed with associations between English-Dutch-German. That thing about Afrikaans being originally written in Arabic is indeed interesting, curious that they reverted to the roman alphabet though (much easier i guess and of course, a link to the European motherland). I'm rambling...... | |
| joziboy | Friday 14th of October 2005 08:26:45 PM |
| - Well I assume only the Malay slaves could read Arabic, and since the Dutch settlers lost touch with the Netherlands, perhaps they retained their European alphabet but began to speak Afrikaans in place of Dutch. Dutch was an official language of South Africa until the 1920's when they realised that no one actually spoke it, they all spoke Afrikaans! :) By the way, what is the Dutch for 'an/a' ? Is the Afrikaans word 'n a contraction of een? (but you pronounce 'n as 'uh') eg, Oupa is 'n bietjie moeg vandag. | |
| Mathieu | Friday 14th of October 2005 08:35:43 PM |
| - Yep, in written Dutch it's "een", but in informal texts it's often "'n". It's always pronounced as if it were 'un'. When it really is pronounced 'een' (written as "één"), it means 'one'. The Dutch word for 'moeg' is 'moe', so apparently Afrikaans isn't all flattening Dutch, also new bits and pieces emerge :) | |
| joziboy | Friday 14th of October 2005 09:06:33 PM |
| - Yeah, that's what confused me - een is one in Afrikaans too, and it doesn't make sense to use one all the time! Since 'n is pronounced exactly like English "a" I thought maybe Afrikaans had borrowed it, but obviously not. Sjoe, ek is heltemaal deurmekaar. Dit lyk asof ek kan nie meer as drie tale onthou nie. Ek probeer om in Afrikaans te praat, en ek vergeet alles wat ek in Italiaans en Zoeloe geleer het. | |
| Mathieu | Saturday 15th of October 2005 03:31:58 AM |
| - Hehe, I had a similar experience with "dit" - in Dutch, it means 'this', but it Afrikaans it also seems to mean just "it".. as in like you said "Dit lyk asof .." "Het lijkt alsof .." The Afrikaans one to me sounds like "This seems as if" :p | |
| joziboy | Saturday 15th of October 2005 08:20:12 PM |
| - Yeah, and then you get 'dis' which means 'it is' (dit is) which even sounds like 'this' so it's quite confusing! This = hierdie That = daardie I think I'm finally learning some dutch! I just substitute 'het's for 'die's and add a t on the end of everything: veld - veldt, lyk - lijkt, stad - stadt? | |
| Mathieu | Saturday 15th of October 2005 09:30:57 PM |
| - hierdie = dit (neuter), deze (common) daardie = dat (neuter), die (common) When you say 'this is' in Dutch, 'dit is', you also pronounce it like 'dis' ('das' for 'that is'), not necessarily, but often people do. that -t is actually a verb infection suffix, it goes like this: Ik lijk Jij lijkt, lijk jij Hij/Zij/U/Het lijkt Wij lijken Jullie lijken Zij lijken Think of it like the 's' suffix on English verbs, only Dutch is slightly more elaborate. As for the other words, nouns and stuff, you don't get it, but there are of course other good correspondence rules to think of.. like turning 'z's into 's's, removing end 'n's.. and veld and stad are just like this in Dutch :) | |
| joziboy | Sunday 16th of October 2005 11:27:37 PM |
| - Does that inflection pattern work with all verbs? There are weird coincidences when I wouldn't expect them - you can use 'die' to mean 'that' in Afrikaans as well, if you don't want to use daardie, but it would be a stressed 'die'; ek hou nie van DIE man nie. As for the z/s thing, that must be why south african web addresses end in .co.za (zuid afrika?) And I reread the original post, and my grammar was wrong. You're right, in Afrikaans you would also say: Het jy a goeie nuwejaar gehad? So that tense does exist! | |
| Mathieu | Monday 17th of October 2005 12:04:56 AM |
| - Yes, that pattern goes for all verbs. Except for really basic ones like 'kunnen' (to "can"), which are really irregular. But I do think that every single verb gets the -en (or -n) ending when plural (or when it's the whole verb). Ah, yeah, in case of those 'dit' and 'die' things, there it just seem to have shifted meaning a little bit (as opposed to the 'het' thing, which is just a total coincidence). Hmm you're right, I never realized it's .co.za while in Afrikaans it would in fact be written with an 's' :D Yes, I'd also expect that tense, since that's how you'd say it in Dutch, although there are a few cases (say 1 on perhaps 10-20 past tense sentences) where it actually follows the English pattern rather than the Dutch one, maybe because the English one is easier, or (perhaps more likely) because of English influence. | |
| joziboy | Wednesday 19th of October 2005 04:48:37 PM |
| - I can just rely on all the town names around Cape Town to work Dutch out too, since they're all from the 17th century and have Dutch names: Stellen[b]bosch[/b], so [b]bos[/b] must be bosch in Dutch [b]Muizen[/b]berg, so [b]muise[/b] must be muizen So would the verb table for, eg, loop be: Ik loop Jij loopt Zij loopt Wij lopen Julle lopen Zij lopen? Hmm, dunno how Wij became Ons, or Zij became Hulle. See Afrikaans is more exotic than just badly spoken dialect Dutch ;) Also, just a couple of general questions. How many people speak Dutch? It seems there's a lot of interest in it for such a small language! Is Suriname really Dutch-speaking? And is Flemish a seperate language or a dialect? Apparently Flemish is much easier to understand from Afrikaans than Dutch is, but I wouldn't know - I don't think I've ever heard Flemish. | |
| Mathieu | Thursday 20th of October 2005 12:05:20 AM |
| - 'bos' is actually 'bos' in Dutch, though the older version is 'bosch', yes. 'muizen' is correct, and so is your paradigm for lopen :D 'Ons' actually means 'us' in Dutch, so it is the accusative 'we'. 'Hulle' is similar to Dutch 'hullie', in Brabantian, maybe amongst other dialects. Doesn't mean Afrikaans doesn't have exotic features, but so have Dutch dialects (what about agreement (declension) on prepositions besides the actual verbs themselves? :)) In The Netherlands there are over 16 million speakers of Dutch, in Belgium another 6 million, there are communities in, say, France, but they're not really significant. Dutch was spoken in the former Dutch Indies although that has pretty much disappeared (apart from the odd borrowed word), it's spoken in Suriname (not sure how many, maybe a million?) All in all, of the nearly 7000 languages, in the top of most spoken languages Dutch ends on the 30th place, so it's not all that minor :) About Flemish; there are tons of dialects in Flemish that are completely unintelligable to a normal Dutch speaker (or in fact only understood by a handful of people maybe :D ), but about that I refer you to one of the topics on Flemish, I'm too lazy to link right now but I'm sure you'll find some if you're interested ;) | |
| joziboy | Thursday 20th of October 2005 07:12:03 PM |
| - Ha, how about piesang then! I had to do some research into finding an Afrikaans word that isn't from Dutch! :) (it means banana) Can't find a Flemish forum? Is Frisian the same thing? Agreement declension? You'll have to give examples, I never know the names of grammatical rules! EDIT: Hmm, Flemish can't be Frisian - I just checked out those postings and they seem even more removed from Afrikaans than Dutch. Man there are some strange languages out there! :) | |
| Mathieu | Friday 21st of October 2005 02:02:07 AM |
| - Piesang, yep, that's borrowed here I guess :D Isn't that in fact an Indonesian word? Hmm, I'm too lazy to research the whole etymology of piesang, but if someone is.. :) Hmm no you're right, there's no Flemish forum.. there's also no such thing as a "Flemish" language.. [url=http://www.phrasebase.com/forum/read.php?TID=3121][b]here's a topic[/b][/url] about it, from this forum. About the agreement, in English verbs agree with their subject - in "He has", the word "have" has been inflected for tense and agreement. In some Dutch dialects however, you also have that inflection for tense and agreement on prepositions and on words like "that", so you end up with something similar to "thats he has" as opposed to "that we have" (West Flemish has this for example), weird example but I hope you get the point :) Anyway, it's nothing important, just wanted to point out that between dialects interesting new features can arise, which are even greater apart than whole language standards, in fact. (because I know no standard Germanic language that has this feature!) Frisian is a language spoken in the north of The Netherlands, they're originally not that closely related but they influence each other so they end up rather similar. It's in fact the closest to English related language (just look at the similarities between Old English and Frisian!). Hmm, about 'Muizenberg' again, that's a modern Dutch word, it seems as if the name changed along with Dutch, up to the past century. Because in the time it was originally founded it would've probably been something like 'Muysebergh'.. | |
| joziboy | Friday 21st of October 2005 06:15:09 AM |
| - Cool, thanks I had a look at that Flemish forum. Hmm, that thing about Muizenberg is really interesting. I didn't realise it was modern Dutch. Maybe it has something to do with the NP government (I don't know how much you know about South African history?) trying to make Afrikaans 'more European' in the early 20th century as part of their general racial policies. Back then there were many different dialects of Afrikaans, and some were much more influenced by indigenous African languages and Malay (there are still two very distinct dialects today - one, Cape Malay or Kaapse is quite different than standard Afrikaans) The government of the time tried to strengthen the language's ties to Dutch to make it seem 'respectable' and so promoted the least 'African' Afrikaans. Obviously when they taught us that at school they never mentioned Muizenberg :) But maybe that was one way of reaffirming Dutch heritage? Stellenbosch is old Dutch though eh? And Oranjezigt? (I can't even work out what zigt would be in Afrikaans or what it means) Tamboerskloof? | |
| joziboy | Friday 21st of October 2005 03:53:26 PM |
| - Actually I might have got completely carried away with my history and missed the most obvious sign - Dutch was the joint official language (with English) of South Africa until the 1920's because up till that point they still considered the Afrikaans dialects just to be dialects of Dutch. That must be why they kept up with spelling developments until then. EDIT: Oh and yeah, regarding piesang, it probably is an Indonesian word. Apparently the word Cape Malay, which was used throughout early modern SA history, is a complete mistake as almost all of the original slaves brought to the colony by the Dutch East India Company were from Indonesia. (which is why the Western Cape has a very different ethnic mix than the rest of the country, and the oldest mosques in the country too) | |
| Mathieu | Friday 21st of October 2005 08:52:45 PM |
| - Hmm I know little about South Africa, thanks for the info. Yeah, either way it must have something to do with status of the acrolect: an acrolect is a language standard of a previous group in power, the basilect is the language of the people, the metalect is the actual language the people end up with, and it floats between the two (I think these were the words, it's been a while). For status, people might try to move to the acrolect as much as possible. So yeah, they must've kept up with the spelling developments, maybe even if they didn't declare "Dutch" to be the language they were speaking up to the 1920's, but just favoured the heritage. Hmm Stellenbosch sounds pretty old, yes, but here, Den Bosch is also still written that way (though the actual word is 'bos' by now). 'zicht' in Dutch means sight, 'oranjezicht' would be something like 'sight of orange', 'view over orange'. Tamboerskloof sounds modern I guess, though I don't know if it would've been different back then. | |
| joziboy | Friday 21st of October 2005 09:39:49 PM |
| - Cool words :) so, for the Netherlands, the acrolect would be German, the basilect would be the dialects and the metalect would be Dutch? If I've got the concept right I might start littering my sentences with those words and sounding incredibly intelligent! And zigt must be 'sig' then. Thanks | |
| Mathieu | Friday 21st of October 2005 09:53:33 PM |
| - For Dutch it's different, perhaps there would've been such a construction between German and Dutch in the beginning, but Dutch is not necessairily a descendant of German, they both went seperate ways. And as a comparison, by the time they split, Old Norse would still be spoken in Scandinavia for centuries before it divided into the languages we know there today, so their real relationship is a pretty remote one. Even so, they appear similar of course, most of their similarities are due to influence between the two later on, there must have been periods of attraction and rejection, for example in the past century there was rather strong resistance against German influence on Dutch, related to WW2 mostly, but apparently in other eras the influence must have been rich (if only for the fact most Dutch people can't read Old Dutch at all, but can read some modern German!) French also has taken up a slight "acrolect-like" role (though that is, just as with German, not really the right term as they weren't dominant groups of which Dutch descents), by the time of the Dutch settlers in South Africa, French had a high status, and elements from it influenced Dutch. For example, the rolling r was replaced by a more Frenchy one, pretty much because it was cool to talk with a French accent (which I still use, whether I like French or not :(:p), and for a period of time there was a sort of circumfixing negative element: French has 'ne ... pas' for 'not', this influenced Dutch, and that way Afrikaans too. Dutch has lost it since, but Afrikaans still has 'nie ... nie'. In Belgium there is a Basilect-Acrolect idea, as you can read in that other topic, there are lots of little strange dialects, but if you watch the national news it'll be in pretty standard Dutch. It's a bit classy there to talk as a Dutchman (I have a teacher from Belgium, who has worked here for years, who sounds like a real Belg to us, but in his home country people are like "what's up man? are you trying to sound like a Dutchman or something?" :D) | |
