LL-L "Morphology" 2009.07.20 (08) [EN]

[Lowlands-L List]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 20 July 2009 - Volume 08
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From: dealangeam <atdelange at iburst.co.za>
Subject: LL-L "Morphology" [EN]

Dear lowlanders,

Wesley Parish  wrote:

FWLIW, I think a lot of the same sort of thing caused the changes in Dutch
that resulted in Afrikaans - there were quite a number of Saxon speakers who
migrated to the Cape in sufficient number and with a high-enough status to
make understanding their language necessary but not enough to make the use
of
of it necessary.  And of high enough status that their lapses in speaking
Dutch would be forgiven.

You are close to my own thinking. I think that Afrikaans was actually an
emergence between the two parents Dutch (Hollands) and Saxon (Nederduits).
It was completed during the first 50 years since 1652 at the Cape. Afrikaans
was therefore often called Cape Dutch.

The reason why the Dutch in Afrikaans is so more apparent than the Saxon, is
that Saxon had not a standard written/printed form. The Afrikaners (a word
which came into use about1658) had to read the bible and official
correspondences in Dutch.  It is only in the late 1800’s that Afrikaners
began experimenting with Afrikaans in a written form. This was far too late
to preserve clearly the Saxon heritage in Afrikaans.

Should one hunt for the Saxon clues in Afrikaans as I did, one will be
surprised at how much clues there are in all facets of a language. This is
actually the reason why I stumbled onto the LL-List in 1996.

But, all is not lost. If only present Saxon speakers (especially from NE
Netherlands and N Germany) would try writing in Afrikaans, we may discover
how Afrikaans might have appeared 300 years ago. But I want to stress that
they should do so freely, not heeding at all to standard grammar and
spelling. Any emergence in any realm has a notorious way of disregarding
what have been thought of as fixed rules.

Mooi loop

At de Lange

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From: dealangeam <atdelange at iburst.co.za>
 Subject: LL-L "Morphology" [EN]

Dear Lowlanders

Ron wrote:

Wasn't it rather non-Europeans, such as Malaiic (Malay, Javanese, Sundanese,
etc.)
people and Khoe-Saan people, that were instrumental in transforming (Cape)
Dutch
to start off the development toward Afrikaans?
Ron, you are right. Nobody is denying it.

By the way, the Khoi (Hottentot) played an important role, but the San
(Bushmen) not. Everybody (Europeans, Khoi, Banthu Easteners) hated them,
amiable as they are, because of two things. (1) The concept of property
rights was completely alien to their culture. (2) They were the masters in
hunting and living in the wild veld/bush. Consequently, what they took since
it belonged to nobody, was considered as stealing by everybody else.

Emergence happens by way of chaos (see Prigogine in “Order out of Chaos”).
The chaos at the Cape between 1652 and 1700 was immense. My opinion is that
Dutch and Saxon were the parents of Afrikaans. But the midwife and
afterwards the nanny of Afrikaans were the French, the Germans, the Khoi and
the Malayans.  They helped a lot to get rid of some of the “baggage” of
Dutch and a little of Saxon. They helped the evolution potential of these
two languages to appear. They also imported a significant portion of their
own vocabularies into Afrikaans.

I find it very sad that the evolution potential of a language is driven into
the closet as soon as the standardization of the language happens.

Mooi loop

At de Lange

•

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