In addition, while Afrikaans may use words of non-Dutch origin unintelligible to Dutch speakers (such as those derived from Malay, like baie), their Dutch equivalents, or cognates, are also used in Afrikaans, and would therefore be more intelligible to Afrikaans speakers.įor example, although Afrikaans baie ("very", "many" or "much"), from banyak has no cognate in Dutch, heel as in heel goed ("very good") is used in Afrikaans as well as Dutch. Similarly, Dutch words such as favoriet ("favourite"), film, and station are intelligible to Afrikaans speakers on account of their resemblance to their English equivalents, whereas the Afrikaans gunsteling, rolprent, and stasie (cognate with Dutch statie), while intelligible to Dutch speakers, would be considered old-fashioned. Owing to the exposure of Afrikaans speakers to English, Dutch words like computer, lift and appartement are more readily understood by them than Afrikaans equivalents like rekenaar, hysbak and woonstel are by Dutch speakers. Intelligibility of Dutch to Afrikaans speakers Loanwords vs purisms Īfrikaans uses purisms or calques where Dutch would use loans from French, Latin or English. In Dutch, "now there is" would be translated as nu is er, using the unmarked forms, which do not exist in Afrikaans. Unmarked and marked forms of words Īs Afrikaans no longer has unmarked and marked forms of words, instead using words derived from the marked forms in Dutch, the Afrikaans words for "there" and "now", daar and nou, are more intelligible to speakers of Dutch than the unmarked Dutch forms er and nu are to Afrikaans speakers.įor example, nou is daar, meaning "now there is" in Afrikaans, is sometimes encountered in Dutch although nou is used more colloquially for emphasis, in the sense of the English "well". Similarly, the resemblance of Afrikaans verbs like lees ("to read", Dutch lezen) to the first person singular and verbs like gaan ("to go") to infinitive forms in Dutch means that julle lees ("you read") or ek gaan ("I go") would be understood by Dutch speakers more readily than jullie lezen or ik ga would be by Afrikaans speakers. The simplification of verbs in Afrikaans, with almost all verbs being regular and the near absence of the simple past tense, means that while the phrase ek het gehelp ("I have helped" or "I helped") would be recognisable by Dutch speakers, the Dutch phrases ik heb geholpen and ik hielp would not be as readily understood by speakers of Afrikaans. wees genadig, meaning "be merciful" or "have mercy"). Conversely, wees, meaning "to be" in Afrikaans, is used as the imperative in Dutch, although it is used as the imperative in religious contexts in Afrikaans (e.g. In Afrikaans, het is the inflection of the verb hê ("to have" from Dutch hebben) although sy (cognate with zijn) is used as the subjunctive of "to be", while we in Dutch is cognate with "we" in English, a language widely understood by Afrikaans speakers. Intelligibility of Afrikaans to Dutch speakers Cognate words Īlthough Afrikaans borrows some lexical and syntactical structures from other languages, including Malay, Portuguese, Khoisan languages, Bantu languages, and to a lesser extent Low German, Dutch speakers are confronted with fewer non- cognates when listening to Afrikaans than the other way round. Mutual intelligibility tends to be asymmetrical, as it is easier for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans than for Afrikaans speakers to understand Dutch. Research suggests that mutual intelligibility between Dutch and Afrikaans is better than between Dutch and Frisian or between Danish and Swedish. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, particularly in written form. 6 Comparisons of various phrases in Afrikaans and Dutch.5.9 List of words with different meanings.5.7 False friends due to English influence.5.6 Changes due to spelling and pronunciation.4.4 Merger of marked and unmarked forms of words.4.3 Omitting of subordinate conjunctions.2.2.1 Simplification of consonant clusters.2.2 Phonetically induced spelling differences.1.2.2 Words of Dutch and non-Dutch origin.1.2 Intelligibility of Dutch to Afrikaans speakers.1.1.3 Unmarked and marked forms of words.
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