Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

[Eduard Selleslagh]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Date: Wednesday, September 15, 1999 11:41 AM

[snip]

>No; this doesn't follow.  Let's take a real case.

>In the 17th century, Dutch was introduced into South Africa by settlers.
>Since then, the Dutch spoken in South Africa has, of course, steadily
>diverged from European Dutch -- or, to put it another way, European
>Dutch has steadily diverged from African Dutch.

>Now, until the 1920s (I think it was), African Dutch, commonly called
>`Cape Dutch', was generally regarded as a dialect of Dutch.  But then
>perceptions changed: Cape Dutch was officially named `Afrikaans', and it
>began to be generally regarded as a distinct language.  Today Afrikaans
>has its own distinct standard form, and everybody regards it as a
>separate language.  But Dutch and Afrikaans are still largely mutually
>intelligible, though each sounds very strange to speakers of the other,
>and there are some lexical differences which impede communication.

>But the new autonomous status of Afrikaans results from a political
>decision, and not from any linguistic events.  Nothing happened in 1925
>to convert Afrikaans from a Dutch dialect to a separate language, except
>for a political decision that this should become so.

[Ed Selleslagh]

This is only one, important, aspect: the other one is that Afrikaans has
diverged considerably, and has some characteristics of a Creole (Bantu and
English influences).

>It is probably safe to say that modern Afrikaans is rather more
>different from 17th-century Dutch than is modern standard Dutch.
>But neither modern variety is identical to 17th-century Dutch.

>Moreover, 17th-century Dutch was itself not uniform.  Today the
>varieties of Dutch spoken in West Flanders and in northern France are
>not at all mutually comprehensible with standard Dutch, and I have no
>reason to suppose that things were any different in the 17th century.

[Ed]

They are mutually intelligible with most Flemish speakers of standard Dutch,
i.e. people used to a wide variety of dialects, not with most Dutchmen, who are
used to a more homogeneous language.

>For political reasons, though, all these are regarded as varieties of a
>single language, Dutch.  But it need not be like that, and, for a while,
>it wasn't.  For some time the Dutch-speakers in Belgium took the view
>that they spoke something called `Flemish', a different language from
>Dutch.  But, some years ago, they abandoned this idea, and they now
>agree that they speak Dutch.

[Ed]

Note that there has never been a unified, standard Flemish.  In fact there are
three major groups of dialects: from W to E (West- and East-)Flemish
(Ingwaeonic origins), Brabants (Frankish), and Limburgs (which is close to
Rhineland/Low German). These groups continue into S. Holland, up to the lower
Rhine/Waal/Maas.

To the untrained ear, and if spoken in their lowest registers, these dialects
can hardly be called mutually intelligible. However, nowadays most people (if
they don't use standard Dutch) speak some thing in between standard Dutch and
local dialect. A bit like many people on the BBC, who speak a language half-way
between Queen's English and e.g. Cockney.

>If a language splits into two or more regional varieties which become so
>distinct that we must count them as distinct languages, then both are
>different from their common ancestor.  One may be more conservative than
>the other, but both are different, and there is no principled basis for
>regarding just one of them as identical to that ancestor.  In the
>Dutch/Afrikaans case, we find it convenient to apply the label `Dutch'
>both to the 17th-century ancestor and to the modern language of the
>Netherlands and Belgium, while we no longer find it convenient to apply
>the same label to Afrikaans -- though we did until recently, and we
>could do so again if the political, social and educational facts
>changed.

[Ed]

The basis of the standard Dutch was always the dialect of the culturally and
economically dominant region: first West Flanders (Brugge), the Antwerp
(Brabants), then Amsterdam but with a vast admixture of Antwerp immigrants'
language (as a consequence of the religion wars).  That's the main reason for
the differences in Dutch of various periods.

Ed