Dutch/Lesson Afrikaans

Welkom by die Afrikaans les

Daar is 'n eie wikiboek vir Afrikaans, hierdie is net 'n vergelyking van die twee tale.

Er is een eigen wikiboek voor Afrikaans, dit is slechts een vergelijking van de twee talen.

Afrikaans has its own wikibook. This page discusses the relationship between the two sister languages.

Afrikaans & Nederlands

Dutch is used in the countries The Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname, Netherlands Antilles & Aruba, sometimes in Indonesia and some neighbouring parts of Germany and France. But if you speak Standard Dutch you can also hold conversations very easily in Southern Africa, in South Africa and Namibia.

Since the founding of Kaapstad (Cape Town) in 1652 a variety of Dutch was spoken at the Cape, gradually spreading over much of Southern Africa. Since 1806 the political ties were severed and the spoken languages evolved in their own directions, much as English did in the U.S. and French did in Quebec. Some Dutch dialects and Afrikaans are still very close to each other and the differences between Dutch dialects are at least as big as between Dutch and Afrikaans. In fact, until 1925 there was only one written standard legally recognized both in South Africa and in Belgium and the Netherlands and Dutch had been the official language of both Boer Republics.

Unfortunately, this written standard was rather artificial and archaic and did not reflect what people actually spoke. For example the standard still had case endings and three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). Only certain dialects of Flanders and the southern part of the Netherlands still had at least three genders in the spoken language. The northern Netherlands only had two genders and South Africa only one. The inflectional system was already gradually becoming disused in the Middle Ages and basically collapsed in the 16th century in spoken Dutch, but later grammarians decided that it had to be preserved— even brought back— at all costs. On top of that the spoken language of South Africa had a much simplified verbal system, e.g. it no longer used the simple past tense. There were also numerous differences in pronunciation and semantics.

The discrepancies between the single written standard and what people actually spoke were so large that they created serious educational problems and formed an impediment to social progress both in Africa and in Europe.

This was why the Kollewijn spelling (1891) proposed radical changes for the spelling of the language. It is also known as "Schrijf zoals je praat / Skryf hoe jy praat-spelling" (Write-as-you-talk spelling). In South Africa, where the discrepancies were the most conspicuous, his ideas were implemented in the 1920's with considerable vigor.

In the Netherlands and Belgium (and their colonies) his ideas were dismissed as outrageous and iconoclastic. It was also feared that what had been one language would splinter into many, each of which would be unable to compete in the modern world.

In 1925 Afrikaans was officially recognized as a separate language with its own spelling and grammar, much closer to what people actually spoke. In Europe it was only after the Second World War that the educational and political establishment finally threw in the towel and followed the Afrikaans example. In 1947 the spelling was revised in such a way that case endings (notably the -n in the masculine singular accusative: den) were made optional. Rapidly it disappeared from use. Many silent and superfluous letters were omitted, e.g.:

de menschen wenschen → die mense wens

de boeken van dien aardigen kleinen jongen → die boeke van die aardige klein jong

The reform of 1947 was not quite as sweeping as the one in 1925.

For example the word for at home is still written as thuis (from: te huis) in Dutch, but as tuis in Afrikaans. Similarly, thans (from te hands: now) is written as it is pronounced in Afrikaans: tans.

In part the reluctance to reform had to do with the fact that earlier ideas in Flanders to create a separate standard closer to what was spoken there had largely been abandoned. In Belgium the language was under considerable pressure from a French speaking elite and could ill afford further fragmentation. Even within Flanders the dialects were by no means homogeneous with West-Flemish in the west, Brabantian in the middle and Limburgian in the east showing considerable differences. There was clearly a desire to keep the written umbrella unified despite this considerable variety in the spoken language. This led to increased linguistic cooperation between Flanders and the Netherlands, a more or less wholesale adoption of the northern standard language as umbrella and the creation of the Taalunie. From the 1960s on the Dutch speaking majority in Belgium has largely achieved its emancipation and there is a bit more interest in the idiosyncrasies of the southern varieties of Dutch.

The ties with South Africa in the mean time had become all but severed because the Apartheid government there - amongst other things - emphasized the uniqueness of the Afrikaans language. In fact in 1961 all linguistic ties were broken, when Dutch ceased to be one of the official languages of the new Republic of South Africa. The Netherlands and Belgium increasingly joined the boycott against apartheid. Since 1994 there is a slow process of renewal of ties but the languages have continued to evolve in different directions in the meantime.

Inleiding

Afrikaans: Afrikaans is een van die elf amptelike tale in Suid-Afrika en is ook die grootste, maar nie amptelike taal nie van Namibië. Afrikaans, 'n betwiste kreool van Nederlands, word gepraat deur 6 miljoen mense in Suid-Afrika as huistaal. Naas die 6 miljoen is daar ook 10 miljoen wat Afrikaans praat as tweede taal, vaak naas Engels, Xhosa of Zoeloe

Let op: Hierdie mense wat Afrikaans praat is nie alleenlik blanke Suid-Afrikaners van Nederlandse afkoms nie maar word ook gepraat deur die sogenaamde kleurlinge en swart Suid-Afrikaners.

Tot 1925 het Afrikaans as Nederlands gereken, maar in 1961 het Afrikaans Nederlands offisieel vervang. Tot dié tyd het die mense Afrikaans en Nederlands beskou as sinonieme. Na 1961 heet die taal Afrikaans. Nederlands is oorspronklik die taal van die Nederlandse koloniste, toe die Boere en nou die Afrikaners. Deesdae word die taal deur mense van alle kleure gepraat. Die taal is die meest verspreide taal in Suidelike Afrika en meer as 60% van die Namibiërs kan 'n proffesionele gesprek in Afrikaans voer.

Standard Dutch and Afrikaans

Introduction

English: Afrikaans is one of the eleven official languages in South Africa and also the biggest, but not an official language of Namibia. Afrikaans, a creole of Dutch, is spoken by 6 million people in South Africa as a mother tongue. Beside those 6 million there are also 10 million people that speak Afrikaans as a secondary language, often next to English, Xhosa or Zulu.

Note: This is not only the white South Africans of Dutch descent but also the "coloureds" and also many black South Africans.

It was in 1925 that Afrikaans was recognized as Dutch in South Africa, but in 1961 Afrikaans replaced Dutch officially, till those times it was considered as synonyms. After 1961 the language is called Afrikaans. Dutch was originally the language of the Dutch colonists, later Boers and now Afrikaners. But these days the language is used by people of all colours. The language is the most spread out language in Southern Africa and more than 60% of the Namibians can have a professional conversation in Afrikaans.

Differences between Dutch and Afrikaans

Orthographic differences

Dutch uses the digraph ij for words with a /ɛɪ̯/ diphthong that historically had a long /i:/ sound and still do in many dialects. Afrikaans has opted to use y in its spelling.

Dutch has two ways to spell the same diphthong au and ou. Etymologically they are different, but not in pronunciation anymore. Afrikaans has opted to only use ou.

Phonetic differences

Dutch has voiced consonants like z, v and g that are not pronounced voiced by all speakers or in all positions. There also also unvoiced counterparts written as s, f and ch. In Afrikaans they are all unvoiced and z and ch have been dropped from the orthography.

English: sea

Afrikaans: see

Dutch: zee

Intervocalic -g- has mostly been lost in Afrikaans:

English: rain

Afrikaans: reen

Dutch: regen

Some final consonant clusters have been simplified in Afrikaans

English: night

Afrikaans: nag

Dutch: nacht

However, in the plural the lost t may reappear:

English: nights

Afrikaans: nagte

Dutch: nachten

Grammar

Verbs

One major difference between the two languages is that Dutch retains the simple past tense, Afrikaans does not:

I learn - I learned - I have learned

ik leer - ik leerde - ik heb geleerd

ek leer - ek het geleer

This means that the use of the tenses is different in Afrikaans compared to Dutch.

In the present tense Dutch typically has three forms:

ik leer

jij, hij leert

wij, jullie, zij leren

In Afrikaans there is only one: leer

Verb position

Afrikaans has retained much of the West-Germanic word order that often is the cause of Anglophone frustration when learning Dutch, although there are also differences with Dutch word order.

Negation

In Dutch negation is often done by simply adding the word niet (not) to the sentence. Afrikaans has double negation, adding the word nie twice

English: I have seen him - I have not seen him

Dutch: Ik heb hem gezien - Ik heb hem niet gezien

Afrikaans: Ek het hom gesien - Ek het hom nie gesien nie.

Nouns

Gender

In Dutch there are nouns that take the definite artikel de and those that take het (neuter gender). In Afrikaans all nouns have the same gender as in English:

English: the day - the house

Afrikaans: die dag - die huis

Dutch: de dag - het huis

Dutch gender has consequences for e.g. the inflections that the adjectives take. Consequently, Afrikaans grammar is different on this point.

Plurals

Dutch has two major ways of forming the plural -en and -s. The final -n of the former is not always pronounced depending on region, how quickly one speaks, whether the next word starts with a vowel etc. In Afrikaans it was no longer pronounced at all and was therefore dropped in the spelling.

Dutch: het huis - de huizen

Afrikaans: die huis - die huise

Sometimes where Dutch has -en Afrikaans will have -s, e.g. verbal nouns ending in -ing

Dutch: verwachting - verwachtingen

Afrikaans: verwagting - verwagtings

Vocabulary

Dutch has many words that were borrowed from French in the 18th, 19th even 20th centuries that have not always reached Afrikaans. An example is the word douche. It is of French origin and in Dutch it means shower. In Afrikaans the word for shower is stortbad or stort. In Dutch this word is comprehensible but odd and archaic.

Both languages have a lot of borrowings from English, but for Dutch that is relatively new phenomenon. Afrikaans has resisted the intrusion far more deliberately than Dutch has. It often resorts to calques or translation borrowing where Dutch either has its own indigenous expression of simply uses the English word.

Afrikaans has also picked up more words from Indonesian, particularly the variety of Afrikaans known as Slaams, spoken by the Islamic minority of the Cape who are mostly of Malay descent.

Afrikaans evolved many terms to describe nature in all of its rich South African variety. Sometimes the same word is used for a different animal in the two languages,e.g. the word eland:

Afrikaanse Eland (Taurotragus oryx)	Nederlandse Eland (Alces alces)

Examples of Afrikaans (on left) and Dutch (on right)