Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 October 14

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October 14

Is Afrikaans useful to learn?

Is Afrikaans useful to learn, or is it a dying language? Would I have much use for Afrikaans if I went to South Africa, or is the language falling out of favour? --Plannerton (talk) 10:14, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

It's the third largest first language and by far the largest second language in South Africa. Rumours of it's demise are greatly exaggerated. In terms of performing arts and other cultural activities Afrikaans is in fact doing very well, it's no longer a "pariah" language. How useful you'd find it really depends on your purpose. If you're going to SA just to do business in a corporate environment then English would be the sensible option, but depending on where you are, Afrikaans is very often the natural "default" choice for addressing random strangers (except in Kwa-Zulu Natal where Zulu and English displace Afrikaans into third place). English is the "white collar" lingua franca, while Afrikaans is the "blue collar" one - obviously an oversimplification but basically valid. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 10:56, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Afrikaans is not the mother tongue only of white Afrikaners but also of much of the Cape Coloured population. It is spoken widely as a second language by people from other groups. It is also the basis of creoles known as Tsotsitaals used by many urban blacks. Marco polo (talk) 19:34, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

I am curious whether learning Standard Dutch might not be more useful. Do Dutch language speakers find understanding Afrikaans difficult, beyond the locally determined SA vocabulary? μηδείς (talk) 00:35, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Here is a conversation between an Afrikaans speaker and a Dutch speaker. Contact Basemetal here 01:17, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

I speak English and have had German to the 300 level in university. I find spoken Dutch hard to understand because the h/k/g type consonants are very changed from both English and German, but written Dutch might as well be Anglo-German. But it was very interesting to listen to that video, especially at the end when Theron says she clearly understood the Dutchman in both their means of speaking. The interjected English made me laugh. Afrikaans seems to stands in the same relation to Dutch as Black American English to Standard American, if not much closer. Afrikaans has more simplified grammar and slightly more simplified phonology, and presumably has African borrowings, although you don't hear them in her speech. The biggest part seems to be Afrikaans drops the umlauted/mutated vowels of Dutch More comments from actual Afrikaans and Dutch speakers would be ever so appreciated. That video was GREAT. μηδείς (talk) 01:48, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

The video isn't really that great. Theron's Afrikaans has quite obviously been contaminated by her (General/Californian?) American English accent, particularly her vowels are not "pure" Afrikaans. Keep in mind too that the reporter speaks Vlaams, not Standaard Nederlands. The mutual inteligibility between Afrikaans and Vlaams is significantly easier than other varieties of Nederlands. I speak Afrikaans and SA English natively. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 17:56, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

I have to disagree, I still think it was great. I did not by my silence wish to imply agreement. μηδείς (talk) 19:16, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Agreed that Theron's accent in the clip is very artificial and not native. At least the TV reporter seemed to follow it instantly. Personal experience only, but I gave up trying to talk Afrikaans to ordinary people in the Netherlands and in Belgium, often being understood better in English or French.--Clifford Mill (talk) 09:29, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

For a monolingual English speaker, Afrikaans appears to be the best possible option (besides Norwegian Bokmål) for any foreign language (not counting Scots here) to learn, should they be concerned about ease of learning, utility, and availability of materials. Afrikaans is unmistakably similar to English, easy to spell and morphologically simple, so should be highly accessible ("user-friendly", so to say). And should you ever get into a situation in South Africa where your knowledge of Afrikaans fails you, falling back on English should always be possible. So if you fit this profile, I think it's better to learn Afrikaans first, because the obstacle presented is low (compared to other foreign languages), and should you ever wish to learn Dutch later, it should be easy enough to do so. My idea is that Afrikaans can act as a "bridge" from English to Dutch, just like Dutch can act as a "bridge" to German.

At least it is my understanding that most monolingual English speakers very much do appreciate a language that is stereotypically "easy" and familiar-looking for their first foray into foreign-language learning. Note that I do not personally speak Dutch (although I can read it and to a limited extent understand it in spoken form), nor Afrikaans, but this blog entry makes a strong case for my idea of Afrikaans as the ideal foreign language to learn for the novice Anglophone learner, both from a linguistic and practical point of view. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:12, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I used to work next to a man who had lived in the Netherlands and was married to a Dutch woman. He told me that Dutch people find Afrikaans speakers very amusing, because they sound like speech from an 18th century book. Alansplodge (talk) 21:31, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

The Cape Colony was established in the mid 17th century, linguistic divergence towards a Cape Dutch "dialect" had begun by the end of that century due mostly to mixing with other languages, both native and immigrant. Direct links with the Netherlands were severed at the start of the 19th century when the British took over the colony during the Napoleonic War.

To me, Dutch speakers commented that Afrikaans sounded like children's Dutch (probably due to the simpler morphology and partly pronunciation, reduplicated forms like wei-wei, some words, such as distinctively Afrikaans coinings with diminutive suffixes, loanwords from Malay and African languages and who knows what else). That's the complete opposite, isn't it? What exactly could make Afrikaans sound archaic? It's not exactly famous for conservative traits contrasted with Dutch. Perhaps certain words that have become obsolete in Modern Dutch? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:20, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Actually, that's pretty common that "colonies" will retain archaic forms like gotten and rhotacism while acquiring new vocabulary like opossum, raccoon and skunk. There's a term for it, someone will mention it shortly. μηδείς (talk) 03:19, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Please investigate Volapük as well.--Jondel (talk) 10:44, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Using "extends" for "is extended"

Following sentence is quite natural for native speakers but it sounds odd to a non-native speaker like me:

• "Our land extends as far as the river."

I would have said in my Indian English

• "Our land is extended as far as the river."

Which are the verbs which behave like this and why? Vineet Chaitanya (talk) 12:28, 14 October 2014 (UTC)Vineet Chaitanya

That usage of "extend" shows less of a grammatical subject / semantic agent discrepancy than "sells" in "This book sells well". They're sometimes called "middle verbs" (no Wikipedia article as far as I can tell). In many Romance languages (French etc.) such verbs would appear in the reflexive form (with "se" etc.)... AnonMoos (talk) 13:14, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

"This book sells well" does not pose a problem for us, because we can interpret the word "sell" in this context to mean "बिकना". Transitive "sell" would be translated as "बेचना" in Hindi. Vineet Chaitanya (talk) 06:15, 15 October 2014 (UTC)Vineet Chaitanya

Extend is used at least as often as an intransitive verb as it is as a transitive verb. It is considered an ambitransitive verb, which may be the term you are looking for. The Indian usage is nonstandard outside of India. Marco polo (talk) 18:18, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

In Hindi we do have its intransitive equivalent "फैलना". But "Our land extends as far as the river." poses the problem for us because the sentence does not imply any activity. It simply refers to a state! The source of difficulty for us is the meaning of the suffix "-s" in the word "extends". Vineet Chaitanya (talk) 06:15, 15 October 2014 (UTC)Vineet Chaitanya

A lot of verbs do not imply "activity" in the sense of having a semantic agent. In some languages, adjectives are verbs or verb-like. Ancient Sanskrit had a middle voice, which was often used to mean that the subject of the verb was affected by what was being done (similar in this respect to the Romance reflexive)... AnonMoos (talk) 07:06, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

"Is extended" sounds like someone is actively extending it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:57, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

OK. To avoid this problem we would say "The extension of our land is as far as the river." Vineet Chaitanya (talk) 06:15, 15 October 2014 (UTC)Vineet Chaitanya

I think the core problem is the tendency I've noticed in Indian colleagues to use passive voice quite a lot. "Our land extends as far as the river" is crisp and clean. The two versions you've cited are grammatically acceptable but they sound awkward. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:04, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

According to the OED, extend has had this intransitive sense since 1483. It's quite normal, if a bit formal. But Indian English is based on a different taste from American and other Englishes and has had different influences. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 14:30, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Nonetheless, it's passive voice. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:40, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

To be clear, the first Indian version "Our land is extended as far as the river" is indeed passive, but the latter one "The extension of our land is as far as the river" is active not passive (see below). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:12, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

That's hardly "active", you can't say *??"As far as the river is been (by the extension of our land)". There's neither an agent nor a patient in this sentence. Copular/predicative sentences are usually considered neither active nor passive.

Modern Indo-Aryan/Indic languages such as Hindi or Bengali use ergative constructions in past-tense sentences; this might go a long way in explaining the tendency of Indian English towards employing passive constructions, which are structually very similar. (Indian English, incidentally, does not mention this tendency. Perhaps it should?)

An Indological note: The same tendency towards overusing the passive is already found in Classical Sanskrit literature, which was written at a time when the vernacular was already in the Middle Indic stage. While the origins of the ergative construction are found already in early Indo-Iranian and Old Indo-Aryan (such as Vedic Sanskrit), it appears that it really fully blossomed only from the Middle Indic stage on, when the original past-tense categories such as imperfect and aorist inherited from Sanskrit became obsolete, to be replaced by the ergative construction. Theodora Bynon has written on this. Originally, the case used (as "ergative") to mark the agent was the genitive; this is still seen in Iranian, where Old Persian starts to replace the imperfect and aorist, still in use in the oldest inscriptions, with the manā kṛtam (astiy) ("of me is made/done") construction (which has evolved into Modern Persian man kard-am "I did", where the expected -ast has been replaced by -am from Old Persian a(h)miy "I am" from a similar construction). The same construction is also found in other Iranian languages.

However, on the way to Middle and Modern Persian it happened (probably for phonetic reasons) to disappear, or at least lose its ergativic structure, and its descendant now works like an accusative-type construction again. However, there are conspicuous traces of the former use of genitive for the agent, especially man (originally the genitive form of the pronoun, i. e., "mine, of me") for "I" instead of an (from Old Persian adam, compare its etymology), which is still attested in Middle Persian besides man, but also the plural ending -ān from the Old Persian genitive plural ending -ānām and the use of a mute yod in the Pahlavi script used to write Middle Persian at the end of singular nouns, which has been argued to go back to the Old Persian genitive singular ending -ahya.

In Indic languages, on the other hand, the genitive was eventually replaced by the instrumental in the ergative construction (at least in Classical Sanskrit, in Middle Indic the instrumental merged into the dative), so that it looks like an ordinary passive. Modern Hindi, on the other hand, which has lost all the case inflections and uses postpositions in their place, uses the particle/postposition ne (by the way, this one is also analysed as a clitic) – which, I have to assume, Indians tend to equate with English by, but the Hindi ergative construction is not a passive, even if it looks like one, because there's no corresponding active it is synchronically derived from, the agent is not usually dropped, and the antipassive provides a mirror image of the passive in accusative languages; see also this paper for some more details. (Interestingly, there is another postposition, ke "of", whose etymological origin is, as I have just learned, the passive participle kṛta- "made, done", the precise cognate of the mentioned Old Persian kṛta: ke also means "made of".)

The typological background of the ergativity split found in Indic (and other) languages where the past uses the ergative construction and the present the accusative alignment we are used to is actually fairly easy to understand: Perfective past propositions such as "I have boiled an egg" are frequently grammaticalised out of a combination of PAST PARTICIPLE + POSSESSIVE; however, as there are two types of possessive constructions, those using a transitive verb meaning "hold" or "own, possess" or the like, and those employing a case marker along the lines of "of/with me is ...", there are two possibilities to realise this template: either the way "I have a boiled egg", which, with a subtle change in word order (as in Vulgar Latin habeo (unum) ovum coctum > Italian ho un uovo cotto > ho cotto un uovo), morphs into our familiar perfect past I have boiled an egg, or "of/with me/mine is a boiled egg", which can easily transmogrify into an ergative construction. Therefore, the origin of the Indo-Iranian ergative construction is not an actual passive, per Bynon, but a raised-possessor construction whose meaning was originally that of an evidential (as e. g. "by/with me is a broken teacup" and likewise "I am holding a broken teacup" strongly implies that I have broken the teacup without saying so explicitly: the listener must infer it from the evidence that a broken teacup is close to me, or that I am holding it in my hand; the German construction mir ist eine Teetasse zerbrochen, literally "to me is a teacup broken", i. e. "I have accidentally broken a teacup", the "oops" construction as I like to describe it, interestingly, strongly resembles an ergative construction and could possibly be described as one). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:24, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I've amended my post. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:29, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

To me "is extended" means "is longer than it was"; and "the extension of our land" suggests an arm narrower than the main body of the parcel (e.g., India has an extension east of Bangladesh) rather than the extent. —Tamfang (talk) 21:32, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Florian and Vineet Chaitanya: Is के quoted as the basic form? Since that postposition's form varies according to the "possessee" (m. sg.: का, f. sg.: की, m. & f. pl: के) (is that a word?) I would have assumed का would be considered the basic form? Just a minor technical question. Contact Basemetal here 15:26, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, you're completely right, का is treated as the basic form. I don't really know Hindi, obviously. Usually you simply say the possessed, see Possession (linguistics). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:33, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

In general you are right but there is at least one exception. The "के" in the sentence "राम के एक बेटी है" does not have underlying form "का".Vineet Chaitanya (talk) 10:40, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Is this "Ram has one daughter"? Now if you want to say "Ram has one son" and "Ram has two children" you would still use के in both cases and say "राम के एक बेटा है" and "राम के दो बच्चों हैं"? Contact Basemetal here 17:31, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes. Just replace "दो बच्चों हैं" by "दो बच्चे हैं"? Vineet Chaitanya (talk) 12:41, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Oops. Direct case of course. Sorry about that. Contact Basemetal here 19:17, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Did the English language have a writing system or script prior to the Latin alphabet?

Did the English language have a writing system or script prior to the Latin alphabet? If so, what was it? 140.254.226.241 (talk) 16:45, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes. See Anglo-Saxon runes. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 16:59, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

It should however be borne in mind that the Romans introduced the Latin script to Britain long before there were any Anglo-Saxons. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:05, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

True, but it's the Anglo-Saxons that brought what became the English language to Britain. When the Romans were there the locals all spoke various Celtic languages. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 17:21, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

This is a tangent, but not all Britons spoke Celtic. Some spoke British Latin. Also, they didn't speak various Celtic languages. While there were surely regional dialects, they were mutually intelligible as a Common Brittonic language. But Dominus Vobisdu and Dodger67 are correct that runes were used for Old English before Latin characters were. Marco polo (talk) 18:14, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Marco Polo: Not to nitpick, especially on a tangential remark, but the linguistic affiliation of Pictish and its relation if any to Brittonic is still unclear and will probably remain so. Contact Basemetal here 19:44, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

The first known book in Old English is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which was written entirely in the Latin alphabet. There are not many extant texts in Old English using runes, but they did undoubtedly use them. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 18:57, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Kage Tora means to say the oldest extant book, not the earliest known script in AS is in the Latin alphabet. The earliest known Germanic (hence AS) scripts in England are in runes. It's quite interesting that runic and Etruscan are very similar, and Latin seems to be a development of Etruscan. Hence (continental) Runic appears to co- or most likely predate classic Latin. The fall of Rome to Odoacer and the arrival of the AS in England seems to occur within at most a few decades of each other. μηδείς (talk) 02:04, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes, indeed. I did actually use the word 'book'. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 18:14, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

To avoid confusion: Medeis is talking about scripts when she mentions runic and Etruscan, not languages. There was an Etruscan language, which is still largely undeciphered, and nothing like anything that has ever been spoken in Britain. --ColinFine (talk) 15:50, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

It's often claimed that Runes likely derived from an "Alpine alphabet" similar to Raetic described on article Old Italic script. If true, this would imply that the distinctive line of development leading to Runes (though not necessarily Runes themselves as we know them) branched off in the B.C. period, but would not mean that Runes are as old as early Latin script... AnonMoos (talk) 04:03, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes, to both Colin's and AM's comments. μηδείς (talk) 17:42, 15 October 2014 (UTC)