<div style="text-align: center; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">===========================================<br>L O W L A N D S - L - 21 July 2009 - Volume 03<br style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);"><a href="mailto:lowlands@lowlands-l.net">lowlands@lowlands-l.net</a> - <a href="http://lowlands-l.net/">http://lowlands-l.net/</a></span><br style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);">
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===========================================<br></div><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI"><span class="gD" style="color: rgb(121, 6, 25);">Mark Dreyer</span> <span class="go"><<a href="mailto:mrdreyer@lantic.net">mrdreyer@lantic.net</a>></span></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Subject: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI">LL-L "Morphology" 2009.07.20 (07) [EN]<br><br></span><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" bgcolor="#ffffff">
<div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" lang="NL"><font size="3">Dear
Ron:</font></span></div><span style="font-size: 11pt;" lang="NL">
<div><br><font size="3">Subject: LL-L Morphology</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font size="3">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.</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font size="3">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.</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font size="3">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).</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font size="3">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).</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font size="3">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!</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font size="3">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.</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font size="3">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
<strong>one</strong> 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.</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font size="3">This is important to me. When I seek
<strong>linguistic</strong> '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.</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font size="3">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. </font></div>
<div> </div>
</span>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.</div>
<div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> </div>
<div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">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.</div>
<div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> </div>
<div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Well, That's my rant.</div>
<div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> </div>
<div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Yrs as ever,</div>
<div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Mark<br><br>----------<br><br><span style="font-size: 11pt;" lang="NL">From: R. F. Hahn <<a href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com" target="_blank">sassisch@yahoo.com</a>><br>
Subject: Morphology<br><br>Hi, Mark!<br><br>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.</span><br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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 <i>baie</i> from Malay <i>banyak</i> (pronounced [baˈɲak̚] 'much', 'very'). Furthermore, Afrikaans adjectival and adverbial reduplication (i.e. <i>gou-gou</i> 'very quickly/soon') is rather similar to that in Malay whose reduplication system is much more elaborate, however.<br>
<br>Regards,<br>Reinhard/Ron<br>Seattle, USA<br><br><br><br><br></div><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
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