LL-L "Lexicon" 2009.11.17 (01) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 17 November 2009 - Volume 01
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From: dealangeam <atdelange at iburst.co.za>
Subject: LL-L "Lexicon" (04) [EN]

Germanic recovery



Dear Lowlanders,



I have followed the thread “if the Normans did not ...” with immense
delight.



I have special appreciation for Sandy’s viewpoint that one cannot simply
replace words of Romanic (Latin and Greek) origin with words from Germanic
origin and expect English speakers to understand intuitively what these
words mean.



But what applies to English need not to be prescribed to other Germanic
languages. What often delights me to the seventh heaven is the extraordinary
power of my mother tongue Afrikaans to express thoughts in a Germanic
manner. It is the youngest of all languages, but its roots go back to 3 000
years ago into proto-Germanic. Most linguists consider it to be a sort of
creolic derivation from Dutch. But to me it is a magnificent emergence
between 16th century Hollands and Nederduits (Low German).



I have written a series of articles on Onomkeerbare Selforganisasie (OS)
(“irreversible self-organization”) involving the concept entropy. Fellow
Lowlanders can have a look at

http://www.woes.co.za/skrywers/6377_ontluiker.htm



I have decided to write these articles in Germanic words as far as possible,
obviously in the Afrikaans idiom. I tried to avoid words of Romanic origin.
What I did was to supply the English equivalent (and usually the
international term) in quotation marks. To my surprise and great delight I
got some emails from interested people abroad who are interested in the OS
topic. Google put them on the track with these international terms in
quotation marks. They also had to use Facebook to get in touch with me.



They were all surprised that the articles were written in a language which
they could not comprehend even closely. They begged me to translate the
articles into English. My answer was simple and polite: find someone who can
do the translation for you. Do we not need job creation? The result is that
three groups are now translating them in English, French and Hebrew.



One of the last words which troubled my brains was the word complementarity.
It concerns a very important concept in hard core physics and chemistry. To
explain its meaning needs about 500 words. By the end of it, most people
would have lost interest in the concept. This will not do.



So, what I did is to think deep and wide about what the concept implies.
Then I had to select Afrikaans words which are still in use and will reflect
that meaning with little thinking. I decided on the word paarwisseling (“
paar-wechselung”). I cornered about 20 people asking them what this word
might mean. Most people replied that it concerns something which switches
between two possibilities.



To translate this word into Germanic English is impossible. I spent several
hours hunting through all my dictionaries to find a solution. So, Sandy, you
are right. The word “wissel” ( “wechselen”) has disappeared in English.
Trying to resurrect it would be stupid and preposterous. But you are also
wrong. Many words from Germanic origin still exist in English which then can
be used. But will they get used? In the answer to that you may be right
again.



At de Lange

Pretoria

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