LL-L "Morphology" 2009.07.21 (03) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 21 July 2009 - Volume 03
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From: Mark Dreyer <mrdreyer at lantic.net>
Subject: LL-L "Morphology" 2009.07.20 (07) [EN]

Dear Ron:

Subject: LL-L Morphology

Good to read you - of course I always do, even when you dish me up in style.
I beg leave to remind the court I am well aware I speak as a total layman as
against the opinion of that Eminant Greek; hem, the Great Kaunides.

I defer to you without question in the matter of Low Saxon & the other Low
Frankish dialects - & suffixes as such. However these were not the only
people in the VOC around 1650 to 1700. There were Lowland Scots & Northern
English, Danes & Swedes, among many including
dyed-in-the-wool South-Germans. There must have been a sort of hierarchy of
communication at that time between the Heere XVII at the top of the pyramid,
upper-class Hollanders below them, Zeelanders & other denizens of the United
Provinces below these & then other Lowlanders from elsewhere. The (European)
Lesser Breeds without the Law at the bottom of the pyramid were the
overwhelming majority, not excluding servants & slaves. Please note I am not
presenting a thesis but reporting a fact, amply supported by records of the
period.

Labour of non-Company-origin initially included servants recruited from the
local population, slaves & political exiles. The latter cost money to ship,
ate rations & couldn't work the vessel - low priority. The same applied to
horses. It was a frustrating business begging for either from the first days
of the Cape Station (bear this in mind, the slaves, not the horses). The
former were occasionally available but had little to offer by way of skills
the Station needed, & the Station had little in return that they wanted, &
if they were abused they could walk just away into the Bush, as they did
seasonally anyhow, after the grazing (bear this in mind).

Here I begin to extrapolate. Over time economic inter-dependence developed &
so also a service-class of locals & a higher rank of artisan-class (highly
skilled & highly respected for its skills) of Cape Malays. Natural increase
brought numbers up to the point that they passed the Company staff, who were
for the most part kept to a specified strength & rotated out, & settlers
were not encouraged (they would compete with the Company. Jan van Riebeek
himself made this point).

About Jan Alleman's time the non-European lower classes did outnumber the
Europeans, but increase was gradual, & throughout that time the dominant
influence was neither AB Nederlands nor Portuguese-Malay nor the local
Sonqua or //oi//oi. It was pre-eminantly Non-Hollands Lowlandic spoken as a
second language across the board, between Whites, Slamaiers & Bruinmense.
The established staff & servants set the tone & the language-practise for
newcomers, both those that were born into the new situation, & those that
were recruited into it. A governer outranked a captain, just, & could
examine the cargo manifest & crew roll, & re-deploy a few of the latter & a
quantity of the former, but no 'cargo' would be shipped directly to the Cape
- what would be shipped out? Ballast!

Roundabout here, Ron, I loftily ignore what I cannot dismiss, Dutch
suffixes, hem. Allow me only to refer back to the situation that pertained
then.

For the rest, I look for Maly influence in Afrikaans (as one example). Apart
from terminology specific to cuisine & custom (very proper) - of course I
don't know enough - but hear my widow's mite, I find none. The most salient
& portable virtue of Malay, its supurb capacity for ablation has not come
over into Afrikaans, a language crying out for that feature! Word-order:
Maybe Malay practice re-inforced some inherant properties of Nederlands or
Zeeus, & suppressed others but show me *one* feature of word-order in the
Taal that is not inherant to parent Lowland dialects of Europe. As for
Javanese, Sundanese, etc. I have not read up on them, but grandly assume the
same. So also for French, though I think that Hugenot practice did
re-enforce the closing negative 'nie'. My little knowledge of Nama &
Vasikela is little help. In all likelihood the natives of the Cape spoke a
tongue as remote from these as Hungarian is from Gaelic. They also sprinkled
the Taal with loan-words, but there is no tugging of my heart from another
part or property of Afrikaans than terminology, which I would welcome (do
you know that I love the Bushman?): No common linguistic structure.

This is important to me. When I seek *linguistic* 'influence' on a
language I expect it to show in a feature carried over from some other.
While I do not deny that a speaker can abolish a property of a language
simply by not using it, this is not a linguistic contribution (it is more
likely economic or social), & it cannot be ascribed to the usages of another
language, only the limited fluency in the tongue in question. This may be
the basis of my angry misunderstanding with people who grandly accredit
other language-groups with the development of Afrikaans. No: Their languages
don't come into it. I am not being partisan. In three cases I have referred
to I could wish it had.

If the Griqwa tongue, now, had been material in the development of AB
Afrikaans I would expect their style & dialect to be the foundation of the
Taal, which it is manifestly not. Every feature cited to me as notable of
their 'dialect' strikes me as a development from the original, not a
foundation of it. They speak their own style in their own way, but need I
add that for all formal purposes they can be as academic - so to speak - as
any other Afrikaner? So also for the Nama. In so doing I am satisfied
neither does violence to his own culture.

What you say about the locals being in constant contact with the European
settlers simply isn't true, Ron. The White-non-white socio-economic
interrelationship didn't Spring into Being on first contact. It couldn't;
they had nothing they wanted from each other. I do not refer to sailors, who
had rum & wanted women, but market gardeners, who wanted land & planted
crops, an outlandish desire & pointless activity as far as most Koikoi & all
Bushmen (even of today are) concerned. The relationship grew slowly & took
longer than a couple of generations to be established. Even as late as 1880
for another example Zulus saw no point whatever in working for a White man
until the British slapped a poll tax on them, to be paid only in coin, to be
earned from White farmers. I believe service relationships in which
non-whites could begin to exercise germinal influence on the culture,
especially the young, had to wait until Afrikaans as a language was fairly
rooted. So much for 'native' servants.

As for imported ones, I made the point already, household help was not too
thick on the ground. As you say, the Governer & his senior staff surely had
ayas in the household, certainly so if they were posted back from Batavia or
Mauritus, but they were the top of a very broad pyramid. What about free
farmers & their wives? It was almost too much trouble to ship girls from
orphanages for the singler free settlers, would unskilled slaves rate a
berth? They didn't, you know. You are of course correct about the
Administration's hostility to 'Cape Dutch'. They appointed a teacher in
Nederlands for the Company slaves.

Well, That's my rant.

Yrs as ever,
Mark

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Morphology

Hi, Mark!

All admiration is mutual. Also, on this list there is supposed to be no
pulling of ranks (or of anything else for that matter). What may have looked
like pummeling (and I love this word) was meant to be a friendly nudge. Our
self-appointed amateur philosopher, the more or less great Kahounaes the
Lowlander (Καὁυνάες την κατωμερίτης), wouldn't have it any other way.

Mark, two or more speaker communities tend to participate in the development
of contact languages, pidgins at the first stage and creoles at the second
stage. It is not as though the result is features of all native languages
packed into one new language. We are talking about complex processes in
which numerous factors and conditions play a role, not least being the
relative social states of the participants. Typically, the lexicon of the
socially dominant language is used and the grammar tends to be simplified,
simpler than the grammars of any of the participating languages.

Afrikaans is not a really creole, but many people think that it has some
creole features, which is why some call it a "half creole" or "semi-creole".
It is far closer to Dutch (including non-standard Dutch varieties) than it
would be were it a true creole. Consider Petjoh (Pecok), which is simplified
Malay with strong Dutch lexical influences, aside from influences from
French, Javanese, Sundanese, Chinese, etc. The base is Malay; it has no
basic Dutch grammatical features.

Afrikaans has undergone considerable morphological simplification but is to
a large degree understandable to speakers of Dutch, at least in writing.
Aside from that it shows signs of influences from various other languages,
mostly of lexical nature.

Most Malay lexical loans in Afrikaans -- denoting specific items previously
unknown to Europeans -- are said to be not Cape-specific but to have already
been adopted in overseas Dutch varieties prior to the Cape settlement. But
there are in Afrikaans "little" things like *baie* from Malay
*banyak*(pronounced [baˈɲak̚] 'much', 'very'). Furthermore, Afrikaans
adjectival and
adverbial reduplication (i.e. *gou-gou* 'very quickly/soon') is rather
similar to that in Malay whose reduplication system is much more elaborate,
however.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

•

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