Whats your favorite Germanic language?
Afrikaans, Vlaams and Hollands ALL went away from old Dutch. Most Vlaams and Hollands dialects stayed close to each other in their evolvement (Hasselt excluded) and Afrikaans parted ways at some point.
As for how "Norwegian" looks and osunds, first of all you are talking about bokmaal and NOT nynorsk, and secondly, you could say that Norwegian is the paramount Nordic languages and the Swedes do not know how to write and the Danes do not know how to read, or you could say that having been tricked into a position of a colony, Norway suffered tremendous influence of Danish and later for a shorter while also Swedish.
Eventually you could also say that bokmaal is basically less corrupt old Danish under a light Swedish influence, while modern Danish was heavily influenced by German and to some degree French.
>>> Afrikaans is just plain old Dutch from hundreds of years ago, <<<
>>> so it is most definitely not what Dutch will sound like in 100 <<<
>>> years from now. Why go back to a rusty outdated version? I <<<
>>> like Norwegian a lot, because it's fascinating how written <<<
>>> Norwegian looks like Danish, and spoken Norwegian sounds <<<
>>> more like Swedish. <<<
> Afrikaans is just plain old Dutch from hundreds of years ago, so it is most definitely not what Dutch will sound like in 100 years from now. Why go back to a rusty outdated version? I like Norwegian a lot, because it's fascinating how written Norwegian looks like Danish, and spoken Norwegian sounds more like Swedish.
What an ignorant thing to say. This mistaken view seems rather common in Europe though. It seems to be based on two things, false logic and prejudice. The false logic is that since Afrikaans is decended from 17th Century Dutch it must be, or at least strongly resemble 17th Century Dutch. The reality though is of course the language that most resembles 17th Century Dutch is (surprise surprise) Modern Dutch. The second part seems to be an ugly prejudice that Afrikaners must be backward, primitive boors, this seems to be fostered by the media in Britain that only features Afrikaners who happen to be followers of the extreme-right fringe in South Africa. It is as if the British were only depicted abroad as members of the National Front and mindless hooligans.
From an Afrikaans point of view, Dutch can seem rather archaic as it has many features that have been lost in Afrikaans like grammatical gender, strong verbs, the simple past tense, and much verb inflection. From the Dutch point of view Afrikaans can seem childish or crude for levelling irregularities and being heavily simplified.
From an English point of view, imagine a language decended from English in which you'd say "I has singed", "you has singed", "he has singed" instead of "I have sung", "you have sung", "he has sung" or "I is cold", "you is cold", "he is cold" instead of "I am cold", "you are cold", "he is cold" etc.
My most favourite Germanic language is certainly German, and then Swedish and British English.
British English, namely (King's English, or Queen's English), absolutely sounds more beautifully, gracefully and decently than American English.
Serbo-Canadian in China,
>>Afrikaans, Vlaams and Hollands ALL went away from old Dutch. Most Vlaams and Hollands dialects stayed close to each other in their evolvement (Hasselt excluded) and Afrikaans parted ways at some point. <<
Please stop posting nonsense like this you know nothing about the Dutch or Afrikaans languages and your posts are full of, well, crap.
You say that Dutch is made up from Hollandic and Flemish, which is totall nonsense and ridiculous.You seemed fixed on "Hasselt", a Flemish village, and you say Afrikaans evolved from OLD DUTCH which is totall crap!
Old Dutch is Dutch written between 450 and 1150, a time when South Africa wasn't even discovered by Europeans.
Just quit posting your nonsense.
Here are some facts for jav-the-simpleton, simplified to his -- or should I say: "its"? -- level:
1. Old Dutch is definitely the mother of Afrikaans. Afrikaans did develop from that language, just as did modern Dutch in tis northern form (colloquially: Hollands), and its southern form (colloquially: Vlaams).
Old Dutch lasted until early 16th century. Middle Dutch is an integral part of Old Dutch, i.e. it is significantly further away from Modern Dutch than from the Old-Dutch-in-a-narrow-sense.
(Did I mention that your reliance on surpassed traditional prescribed quasi-knowledge makes you appear as a Fachidiot?)
2. Hollands and Vlaams are different forms which have not been brought together with orthography reforms. Moreover, orthograpgy does NOT influence pronounciation.
(Did I point out that you do seem to have a problem with the auditory part of languages, and concentrate on the regurtiating of grammarians' garbage you were fed with?)
3. Hasselt region is the one part of the Low Countries where a dialect closer to German than to ABN is spoken. Even Sinjoorkse Brabaants is genuinely Dutch in a way Hasselts is not.
4. you are a pathetic little thing, ain't you? ;-)
baby please dutch is better than german
>>This website has quite a few songs in Afrikaans with English translations of the lyrics. It's also a good resource for learning the language. <<
I found this site quite suprising. I never knew Afrikaans and English shared that many similarities. Granted, without the translations I wouldn't have known what the songs were about but there were also alot of words that were quite similar in both languages.
> I found this site quite suprising. I never knew Afrikaans and English shared that many similarities. Granted, without the translations I wouldn't have known what the songs were about but there were also alot of words that were quite similar in both languages.
Yes, Afrikaans is one of the most similar languages to English. If one disregards Scots (which I do not consider a separate language from English) only the Frisian language and arguably Dutch are closer to English than Afrikaans. I say arguably about Dutch because although Dutch is one step closer to English than Afrikaans is by descent (because Afrikaans has diverged a great deal from Dutch, and English and Dutch share a common ancestor) Afrikaans has aquired many of the same grammatical characteristics as English such as loss of grammatical gender and much inflection.
Some similar words:
vlam - flame
was - wax
vuur - fire
as/ash
jou - you/your
lig - light
dou - dew
wind - wind
reën - rain
is - is/are
geleen - borrowed (loaned)
kan - can
see - sea
blou - blue
breek - break
skyn - shine
somer - summer
son - sun
my - me/my
vind - find
dag - day
my favorite germanic language is English; It is the the only one I know
i know = I can speak.
for me all the other germanic languages look similar. I think I would have difficulties to make a difference between Danish and Swedish for exemple, or between German and Dutch.
fab,
Germanic languages differ from each other to a greater degree than some other language families such as the Romance or Slavic languages. Roughly speaking, Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive they are with respect to an overall trend towards analycity. Some, like German, Dutch and Icelandic, have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology ultimately inherited from the Proto-Indo-European language. Others, like English, Swedish and Afrikaans have moved towards a largely analytic type.
While I would agree the differences between a Swedish
and Danish text aren't easy to spot for a complete layman (which I assume you are) the differences between Dutch and German should be quite easy to spot.
Ed,
>> (because Afrikaans has diverged a great deal from Dutch, and English and Dutch share a common ancestor) <<
Dutch, and English have but one common ancestor that's "Common West Germanic" which is the ancestor of every West Germanic language.
> Dutch, and English have but one common ancestor that's "Common West Germanic" which is the ancestor of every West Germanic language.
What I was trying to say is that English, Dutch and Afrikaans have a common ancestry but that Afrikaans has become more analytic, like English, through convergent evolution and therefore is more similar in some ways to English than Dutch is.