LL-L "Language varieties" 2007.09.13 (02) [A/E]

[Lowlands-L List]

L O W L A N D S - L  -  12 September 2007 - Volume 02
Song Contest: lowlands-l.net/contest/ (- 31 Dec. 2007)
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From: Mark Dreyer <mrdreyer at lantic.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2007.09.07 (03) [E]

Beste Luc:

Subject: LL-L "Language Varieties"

Could you give me another reason why you think that the "makers" of
Afrikaans were no native Dutch speakers?

Well, Luc, the string is getting better & better. Right now I am tempted to
sit back & watch it grow, thanks to Your input, & Ron's, & Paul's, &
Elsie's. Just goes to show what a bit of spitting & digging & manuring (with
bull**** of course) around language roots can do.

The reason why I took so long to respond is that I was off on the Old Man's
farm this week-end, for his birthday. It was a poignant occasion. Last year
this time I was in intensive-care & all the guests had their minds on me,
not my father. Thanks to all your prayers I have had whatever due to me
postponed by a year. Casting no nastertians (or is it trapiolum?) I
personally feel most heartened by a certain warm Tone I never heard from a
bronze bell in a Shinto shrine by the hand of a really stubborn
bloke...(darem 'n koppige kêrel).

& what do I find? I'm at the back of a looong cue (heh heh).
I hold with Paul about the analytic drift of Afrikaans, & the other
thing impressing me is the wealth of similes in the Taal, clearly owing to
many other tongues or dialects (not a patch on English, of course). Reading
Jan Alleman's diary it is obvious how dependant the VOC was on
non-Nederlands staff, so much so that a man who could serve as an
interpreter & guide to would-be employees found himself in the pound-seats.
Here is where I begin my own extrapolations. The point just raised made
actual fluency & literacy in AG Nederlands a seriously paying skill, & those
who had it got quick promotion to the plumb posts back home or in the Far
East, which De Kaap most certainly was not - only a refreshment station,
after all.

The few fluent in the language that did make it to the Cape had a very brief
stay indeed, & I might add that everybody hoped for the same, from the
lowest to the highest, & that included van Riebeek (didn't he make it to
Mauritus?). Let me add, that to a South African a Nederlands telephone
directory makes entertaining reading. It's the names... Granted the
ossification & flim-flammery brought about by Code Napoleon, so many native
Dutch surnames are stranger to us almost than Scots'.

I am afraid I disagree with you, Elsie, that the Proto-Taal was any degree
shaped by Koi-koi or Bushmen. However, if I tried to support my thesis (it
would be a bit of a dissertation) with information actually at my disposal,
the first challenge coulddd be that the small Hottentot & less Bushman I
know has the added difficulty that they were not the tongues spoken by the
aborigines that van Riebeek & his crew met. Anyhow, here goes, & bear in
mind my touchstone is the English spoken today, on two fronts - The UK & in
the Creole areas of the Caribbean.

As shown by English, peoples that blend their languages do so in both
directions, & there would be no substance to the term 'substrate' if it were
not so. Most language influences are a good deal more manifest than that.
Look at all the creoles. We can annotate the ME borrowings from Old Norse,
from Old English, from Old Norman-French, & from Church-Latin. We can search
until we're blue in the face for borrowings from the Celtic tongues & come
up with a few terms, 'trousers', 'galore' etc. That is about all, even
though there is no doubt that The Old English co-habited with, traded with,
& took slaves of Irish, Cornish, Welsh & Scots. Whether it was used or not,
a great deal or very little, by the Native Briton, English was shaped by the
English.

Equally you will search in vain for more than a few pale references to
Koikoi or Bushman tongues in Afrikaans, & they are mostly technical language
of veldkos or the hunt. Do we have klicks? Some of the Koisan languages had
six. All had at least four. Is Afrikaans tonal? Bushman is. Do we find these
features in the languages of other peoples that had contact with the Koisan?
(apologies for using that term). Yes we do, klicks in all the Southern
East-Coast Bantu Languages, none more so than the Bathembu, I am told.. A
leaning towards tonalities in the South-Central Bantu, as for example
Sepedi.

One might object as I myself have, that some languages are so remote that
there is simply no possibility of blending, but ask yourself if the Bantu
languages are any nearer to Bushman than the Indo-European? Not by my
experience, even with clicks & tonalities. I have not even touched on
grammar & syntax. Anyhow, there are Dutch creoles, I have been reading of
some on record in the area of Old Nuwe Amsterdam, that clearly show their
origins in the mix-& match of terminologies & constructions from the native
tongues - as does Afrikaans also, of course.

As for Malay, I have only recently started reading up on that, & justabout
anything I could offer would with justice be shot down in flames by Our Ron.
I will dare one thing. The supurb capacity that Malay has for ablative
language doesn't show in Afrikaans, even though the Taal seems to be made
for it.

No; Malay contributions to Cape Culture are formidable, so much so that
without it we would find our volkseie signally different, & notably poorer.
This is so on every front but the linguistic, in my opinion. 'Gou-gou', Ron?
Ja, wel, maar wys my die Slamaierse gedeelte wat uit die woordeboek
uitgeskeer kan word. 'n Stapel tegniese woorde en dis omtrent al.
Mynsinsiens 'n jammerte.

I appeal Occam's razor, with no more than a minimum of streeetching, not to
unnecessarily multiply causes. I hear what you say, Ron, about Zeeland not
providing the foundation of the Afrikaner people, but it fits in well with
my perception that these seafarers, the lower-decks backbone of the VOC,
were also too useful to be planting vegetables & tending cattle at the Cape.
They set the parameters of the communication medium to which the rest, in
the interests of communication, conformed, & were promoted out of the Cape
Station soon. The representative majority of Afrikaners were also not
Zeelanders.

I aver that every significant development of Afrikaans can be traced back to
features already present in 17th Century Nederlands & related dialects,
without moving any significant distance from the same.
Paul's input: That (those significant features of Afrikaans as the
double-negative, simplified suffixes, nul grammatical gender etc.) seems
amazingly early! less than 60 years after Jan van Riebeeck's first colony,
and it raises a couple of questions:  Does this show just how fast
linguistic change can occur, or is it evidence of Dutch or other Lowlands
presence in southern Africa before the "official" date?

I wouldn't say a presence in the Cape as such, Paul, but rather in the
ship-board, sea-faring population that settled the Cape, & not merely two
generations, but several more. Even so, linguistic change can occur very
rapidly indeed, as fast as it takes to 'learn' a language.

To Elie & Ron, I see two forms of language development, resting largely on
how closely or distantly the languages involved are related. When they are
closely related, the effect is ablative, in which the later features of
both, therefore peculiar & isolated to the one tonge, fall away & the more
archaic, those common to both, are preserved. In the case where there is
practically no relation between the one & the other, agglommerative blending
occurs, where terminology of the economically dominant, for example, is
plastered over the bare bones of the other. English takes the one direction
in respect of Old-Norse & Old-English, the latter course in the case of
these & Old Norman-French. Fanagolo seems to me to be ablative in an
Southern East-Coastal Bantu environment, & Kiswahili, aglommerative with the
same over a Semetic grammatical foundation.

Afrikaans in this scheme of things is manifestly ablative in a Lowlands
Language environment. Yes, there are many borrowings out of the context of
these tongues, but not enough, I say, to rate as a creole, or agglomorative
contribution.

Having fired my volley, I make for the bottom of the trench & wait for the
barrage......

Yrs, Mark

----------

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

Hi, Mark, and thanks for sharing your take on the matter.

I have never assumed that Afrikaans is a creole, and I'm skeptical with
regard to the term "semi-creole" bandied around at one time (whatever that's
supposed to mean).

Personally, I feel that Afrikaans was originally based on a fairly large
collection of dialects of "Dutch" (in the widest sense), and that -- here I
agree with Elsie et al. -- its further, Africa-specific development was in
large part influenced by its use by speakers of other languages, European,
Asian and African.

I still believe that among these influences there are not only lexical
importations but also, and foremost, morphological and syntactic
simplifications and innovations, perhaps not all but certainly many.
Lexical importation (in the process of geographical and cultural adaptation)
aside, I have never heard of another case in which the blending of varieties
of the same basic language led to such drastic grammatical simplification as
we find it in Afrikaans.  Drastic simplification of English from Old to
Middle is supposedly due to influences of Scandinavian and Norman French
speakers adopting the language.  Drastic simplification of Scandinavian
varieties in their development from Old Norse varieties is supposedly due to
enormous influences of Low Saxon in urban centers (including
Scandinavianized Saxons), perhaps even earlier than that: to the absorption
of Saame ("Lapp") people (whose homelands used to extend to Central and in
part even Southern Scandinavia).  Similarly, spoken Latin acquired drastic
changes and great diversity by way of its adoption among the various
indigenous populations. Foreign substrates may have played some role, even
if not all changes may be due to them.

I feel that particularly proposals of influences due to the use of "Dutch"
by non-European, mostly Southeast Asian, childcare servants (i.e. slaves) on
"Dutch" language acquisition and development among African-born children of
European descent ought not be shrugged off too lightly.  (A similar
phenomenon can be observed in the English dialects of the United States'
southern states where on plantations young children of European descent used
to spend far more time with house slaves than with their parents and with
other adults of European descent.)  Similarly, adoption of "Dutch" among
Khoi-San people and eventually among virtually all "mixed-race" people as
well as people of Asian descent clearly left traces of various substrates.
Formal schooling, literature and non-mundane activities later in life then
exposed people to "good language," which was the Standard Dutch of the day.
This assured continued Dutch influences. Most of this, however, remained
within the "elevated" register reserved for formal situations, such as
bureaucracy, recitation, speech-making, religious activities, and written
styles.  This went on at least until Afrikaans asserted itself fully. Even
then ties with Standard Dutch weren't completely severed. Some archaic
Neerlandisms, especially idiomatic expressions, are still preserved in
today's Afrikaans.

I have a feeling that the genesis and development of Afrikaans is even more
complex than this.  Just as the case of English, it may elude the type of
categorization schemata we have at our disposal today, a type of
categorization that is really rather crude, you no doubt agree.

The genesis and development of new languages is a very fascinating subject
area I feel, all the more so because I believe that all languages emerged
and evolved by way of contacts, i.e. mixing.  I doubt we will ever really
understand all conditions and mechanisms of these processes.  The early
processes tend to take place below the radar, namely on the unwritten,
informal level.  We start paying attention to a new language only once it is
quite pervasive and has reached the post-genesis stage and eventually the
assertion stage.  At those stages there are lots of unknowns and much room
for speculation.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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