Andre from South Africa presents: "The Afrikaner Language Thread"

Sorry about making you feel guilty about this. Deshalb werde ich vielleicht mehr Deutsch gewöhnlich hier sprechen. ;)

Travis

Therefore you will speak more German here?

Ja - hehe

Jy is welkom = you are welcome

Will try my best to understand!! :)

Dieses Thread wird eigentlich germanisch, nicht wahr ?

This thread is becoming German?

No, Greg! :)

>Deshalb werde ich vielleicht mehr Deutsch gewöhnlich hier sprechen. ;) <

The Afrikaans for this will be: Derhalwe sal ek voortaan veel meer Duits as normaalweg hier praat

No, andre isa : I meant Germanic.

Anyway, your answer is right for me.

greg, es könnte gerade vielleicht etwas germanisch werden, ja. Aber wir müssen noch Englisch hier sprechen, denn wir alle spreche nicht Deutsch, Niederländisch, Westflämisch, und Afrikaans. Gewiss ist Englisch eine germanische Sprache jedoch, man muß sich erinnern.

i simply smile sadly at languages i dont understand when they're written extensively on antimoon.

tyrone, I think that was sort of my point above, even though it was expressed auf Deutsch. We don't /all/ speak German, Dutch, West Flemish, and Afrikaans, so hence speaking in English in here is necessary much of the time, as much as some of us would prefer to speak in things other than such here, when we can, myself included.

What are the similarities between English and Afrikaans? Has Afrikaans been heavily influenced by English?

Kazoo

The two languages do have some similarities, but are really quite different. With the two languages living so close together, there have been mutual influences. Quite a number of words in Afrikaans have been taken from English, but English has also taken a number of words from Afrikaans.
The two languages sometimes seem more similar than they really are.

very good new afrikaans website with news, literature, articles, letters, music etc.

www.netafrikaans.com

andre, I would say that the primary major similarity between English and Afrikaans, besides their both being "low" West Germanic languages, is both their significant analyticity, with Afrikaans being even more analytic than English, and the fact that they both have taken on significant quantities of loanwords, even though they have gotten them in many cases from very different sources. However, word-order-wise, Afrikaans is still more like Dutch and German than it is like English, which is one aspect in which it is rather dissimilar from English.