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Posted by1 month ago

Afrikaans isn't a language?

855 comments

96% Upvoted

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· 1 mo. ago

Nothing brings more joy to your life than listening to Afrikaans when you speak Dutch. If I had to make a comparison to English I'd say a sentence like "Do you see that bird in the tree?" would be something like "Eyesight you do wingrat in that leafstick?"

It's like a fun game of decoding, but we can talk to each other, especially the Flemish dialects seem to match rather well. Here's an interview of a Belgian reporter speaking Dutch to Charlize Theron, with her responding in Afrikaans.

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level 2

· 1 mo. ago

A Dutch friend of mine once told me that Afrikaans sounds like 1700s era Dutch to him.

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· 1 mo. ago

Can you give me more of these Dutch/Afrikaans comparison examples bc this is amazing and I’m incorporating “wingrat” into my personal lexicon asap

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level 2

· 1 mo. ago

Reading Dutch as a German feels often the same. You get the meaning from the words but you would have never used them in that context. So fun sometimes.

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level 2

· 1 mo. ago

Wow, that's awesome. I learned Afrikaans at school but I only truly learned Afrikaans in the military.

I spent some time in Holland many years ago and watching TV was fascinating. The Flemish shows were easier to understand than the Dutch but I could get the gyst of most things.

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level 2

· 1 mo. ago

This is a gross exaggeration of course, and one I hope you made purposefully.

The languages are not that dissimilar, where Afrikaans just took all of the difficult and nonsensical rules that Dutch has and simplified them: no “de” and “het”, just “die”. Verbs don’t change based on the tenses: it’s not “ik slaap”, “ik ga slapen”, “ik heb geslapen” but a lot simpler “ek slaap”, “ek gaan slaap” and “ek het geslaap”. You can substitute “slaap” for any other verb and it works.

Now the wingrat and leafstick you mention, that only happens when there is contamination of the language; and rather than taking over words from other, non-dutch languages; they create their own and those are usually quite literal things. Side note: a lot of the words the Dutch find funny, are actually age old words that have not changed in Afrikaans but we’re changed in Dutch (by contamination etc). Examples here are Giraffe (French origin) : Kameelperd, where kameelpaard used be the generally used Dutch term.

There are exceptions of course, but that’s is the gist of it.

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