Re: Austalian cart tray

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:17:20 +1100, Peter Moylan
<peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jitze, you're giving me the impression that upper-class Afrikaans is
almost indistiguishable from standard Dutch, and that the neologisms
belong to the beer-swilling classes. Is this really true? From what I've
seen, even "respectable" Afrikaans is significantly different from Dutch.

Oh certainly NOT indistuinguishable - in fact so far removed that
a Dutch-speaker will be able to "pick up the gist" fairly easily,
but have to expend significant effort to grok the details - and
even then, some sland/foreign words might creep in for which
the listener has no clue.

I speak Dutch pretty fluently, but my actual knowledge of Afrikaans
is close to non-existant. As a schoolboy I heard it spoken by some
of my peers who were 2nd generation descendants of Boers
who had left Sar Thefrica half-a-century before - the extreme tail-
ends of the voortrekkers who made it all the way to Kenya and settled
around a place called Eldoret. So their language - already an offshoot
of Dutch, was an even further offshoot because of its isolation
from the main body.

But as a general rule, I would say that Afrikaans when *spoken*
is broadly recognizable by a Dutch speaker - but tends to give
the impression of baby talk (a lot of words seem to have the
diminutive "ie" appended) and or sloppy because hard vowels
have become softened or elided completely and/or last syllables
of words (like verb endings) chopped off completely. Over this all,
add a layer of very old-fashioned grammar and the net impression
is either comical and/or "of the beer-swillimg classes".

I once attended a lecture given in Afrikaans and delivered by a
very learned professor (i.e. well-spoken and educated post-grad)
and I had a devil of a time even following the overall thrust
of what he was talking about. Later the same day he delivered
the same talk in English, and from that I could conclude that I
picked up less than 50% in the first performance.

On *reading* Afrikaans, I find I have to sound it out
phonetically in order to be able to pick up the Dutch.

There is no way I could speak it or write it - not even close.

Jitze
.

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