The Getz Files

Many people ask me if my Afrikaans helps with Dutch. It does up to a point. So I thought I’d write about some of the differences. (If this doesn't interest you, skip to earlier, quite different posts. If it does interest you, hurrah!)

At this point, I’m just discussing spelling and pronunciation qua spelling and pronunciation. There are some apparent spelling differences that are really different rules of grammar. For example, Dutch forms most plurals with “en”, Afrikaans with “e” and sometimes s (bicycles: fietsen v fietse). That is a different rule of grammar, not a rule of spelling or pronunciation. (In fact, an easy way to see the difference, though it may not be linguistically precise, is that in the above example both spelling and pronunciation change. Though I have also been told that the ‘n’ in Dutch ‘en’ is often silent, so maybe it is just a change of spelling. I’ll leave that to the professionals.)

I’m also ignoring the many changes in vocabulary, many of which can be traced to changes in pronunciation and spelling. For example: the word for “for” - Dutch “voor” (pronounced like for) vs. Afrikaans “vir” (pronounced fəɝ - there is no real equivalent to the sound in English) or the word for through – Dutch “door” (same pronunciation as English word) vs. Afrikaans deur (rhymes with beer). I might get to that later, but it’s more complex.

I am also not going into grammar, but the main difference is that Afrikaans is much simpler than Dutch, again possibly because of contact with English, which may have a wacky spelling but has a very simple grammar.

Spelling

Most of the spelling remains the same. The major changes, it seems to me, were to make Afrikaans look less strange to English readers. The “ij” and “uw” combinations, for example, never appear in English as far as I know. Also, Dutch uses lots of z’s, which are quite rare in English, so those were mainly replaced with s’s. (Afrikaans didn’t jettison all odd-looking (to English-reading eyes – the ‘uu’ combination is quite common.) Why Afrikaans famously doesn’t use the letter c cannot be explained by the same reason. Dutch doesn’t use it a lot either, but the consonantal combination “sch”, perfectly familiar to English, becomes “sk” in Afrikaans. There may be a reason of simplification – consonant compounds are quite complex and many languages don’t use them or use them sparingly.

For a breakdown, see Table 1 below. (If you can figure out how I can get the table back up here, I'd love to know - Blogger help is singularly unhelpful.)

Table 1: Spelling Differences

Dutch	Afrikaans	Tentative rationale
z	s	English
ij	y/ei/i	English
uw	u*	English
ch	k	Simplicity (?)
c	k	Simplicity(?)
sch	s	Allay confusion(?)
mt (end of word)	m	English
en (end of word)	nothing	??

Pronunciation

When Afrikaans developed (1700s -1800s) Dutch obviously had a long written history. I don’t know when Dutch spelling was standardized, but I imagine it happened before Afrikaans became a commonly written language. (English spelling was only standardized in the 1700s with the great wave of dictionary making, especially by Samuel Johnson. Shakespeare famously spelled his name in up to 10 different ways.) As you see from the list above, very little Dutch vowel spelling was changed in Afrikaans, so the two languages look quite similar. But the pronunciation, especially of diphthongs, has diverged quite a lot.

To show the difference I have used, the English word with the same pronunciation, or tried to explain (badly) how it varies – I could use the symbol from the International Phonetic Alphabet, but that is unsatisfactory and I’m likely to make mistakes (my ear isn’t very good). This isn’t complete, and marks only significant differences. If I have made any mistakes please let me know. (If you’ve read this far, I’m sure you know something about Dutch, Afrikaans or linguistics.) (And ditto for this table.)

Table 2: Pronunciation Differences

Phoneme Spelling	Dutch	Afrikaans
ui	lout	similar to “late”, but pronounced with lips curved upwards, perhaps emphasizing the “e” of that sound (the long “a” in English is actually a diphthong consisting of bed + thick)
ei	ice	late
oo	loan or door	jewel
o..e	sofa	jeweller (Br/Saf)
ee	late	beer (Br/Saf)
ou	lout	loaf
eu	you/cute	similar to “fear” (Br/Saf pronunciation) but with the end of the diphthong being hit further back in the mouth to tend towards “food”

Other interesting points:

• When and where the vowel shift occurred (let alone why) I don’t know. I’m also not enough of a linguist to see if it follows any consistent pattern, as in the Great English Vowel Shift (which always sounded like something out of Star Trek to me: “Strap yourselves in tight – we’re approaching the Great English Vowel Shift.”). I may look further into this later. Preliminarily, it affected mainly diphthongs or turned some simple vowels into diphthongs. I don’t know what that means.


• The first book printed in Afrikaans was supposedly the Koran, in 1835, in Arabic script. This reflects what many people now consider the real origin of Afrikaans – as an argot or Creole used by Malay slaves imported by the Dutch.
  
• It’s much easier for the Dutch to understand spoken Afrikaans than vice-versa (I have had this experience all over the place). Why this should be I don’t know; after all, vowel sounds different for Afrikaans speakers are equally different for Dutch speakers. It could be hypothesized that the Afrikaans sounds are more like what one would expect from the written letters, but as a follower of Saussure, I am bound to reject this.
  
• Some Dutch say that written or spoken Afrikaans is like baby Dutch or old fashioned Dutch. I think that’s a bad characterisation and rooted in contempt and a sense of superiority. Here’s why I think so:
  
1. Written: The Dutch rationale is that Afrikaans grammar is simpler than Dutch grammar. I would posit that is actually the sign of a more “advanced” language (I use the term very advisedly). The history of English is partly one of grammatical simplification. Some languages in remote parts of the world which were never written down until the Europeans arrived (as in South America, Africa, the Pacific) have a much more complex grammar than Dutch. The San languages, for example, spoken by nomadic hunter-gatherers, are supposedly particularly complex, but I don’t think the Dutch would say San is more “adult” or “modern” than Dutch.
2. Spoken: I don’t know what it is about the sound of Afrikaans that makes the Dutch think of it as baby Dutch. The consonant sounds are basically all the same; it’s the vowel sounds that change. Yet baby talk is characterised by different ways of pronouncing consonants: difficulties with r, l, s; less differentiation between consonants. Vowels are a much smaller indicator. The only (speculative) rationale I could imagine is fewer diphthongs and triphthongs, but Afrikaans has plenty – they’re just different.


• I never thought I’d defend Afrikaans. In school, my main aim with regards to the language was to fall asleep during class. I never managed though (sign of a true insomniac).
• Afrikaans, like Bulgarian, is extremely rare among languages in that it allows a stressed schwa.


* Afrikaans does on rare occasions use ‘uw’ as in nuwe=new.