Re: Montenegro Independent?!

In article <1149123317_4503@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> "A.E. Gelat" <agelat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
***, I am enjoying this long string on pronunciation. It the email below,
you mention there are about fifteen pronunciations of the English "ough". I
can think of four at the moment, and perhaps there are one or two more that
I do not recollect. The four are: bough as in German bau; trough as in
ruff; through as in thru; though as in tho. Can you please supply some
more?

Seven are given at
<http://www.british-blc.com/academy2/activities/adv_l4_ough.htm>
In a Dutch newsgroup we came at:
1. thought
2. enough
3. through
4. though
5. cough
6. bough, plough
7. drought
8. Scarborough, thorough
9. hiccough
10. trough (as in moth, but apparently only dialectal)
11. lough (as lock)
12. lough (as in Loch Ness)
13. Gough
14. Coughlin

Concerning Dutch and Afrikaans, I think you mentioned that Afrikaans is not
a dialect if Dutch, but a different language. This sounds strange to me.
After all the Afrikaners came from The Netherlands, and I can understand
that the separation produced different changes in each country through the
years. Isn't that similar to England and the USA?

Although there are reasons to state that English and American are different
languages, the case is dissimilar. The grammar in the US is the same as
the grammar in Britain (but consider the differences in terminology!).
Spelling differences and pronunciation differences are not a strong
separation. Especially spelling differences do not count. But consider
pronunciation differences, the short 'a' and 'o' have, in Dutch, in fact
interchanged pronunciation when you compare Amsterdam and The Hague.
The distinction between the two is not vital, and so it is not found to be
distinctive.

Also, the Afrikaner population was quite small in numbers, and could not
sustain a large volume of literature, but relied on Dutch works from the
Netherlands., which helps maintain the similarity. You may have other
reasons; please let me know.

The basic reason is the discrepancy in grammar. The Dutch infinitive of
verbs is nearly lost in Afrikaans, while extremely common in Dutch. Also,
Afrikaans uses double negatives to denote negations, that are unheard of
in Dutch. There are many such differences where the grammar of Afrikaans
has been influenced by the grammar of native languages. And indeed, the
people speaking Afrikaans are able to read Dutch, the reverse is also true.
They can even communicate (as a tour of a South African comedian through
the Netherlands did show, and also a fairly recent fairly popular novel
of a South African writer). But that in itself does not make them the
same language, or one a "dialect" of the other.

Think about it. You probably know Harry Potter. Do you know that there
are serious differences between the US editions and the British editions?
The number of differences have decreased in the course of time (for the
first book it sometimes looked like a re-write), but also in the last
book there are still differences. And not all are related to spelling.
But *none* was related to grammar. Translating a book from Afrikaans
to Dutch would possibly change every sentence to make it grammatically
correct.
--
*** t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924131
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; http://www.cwi.nl/~***/
.

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