"Edward Green" <nulldev00@aol.com> wrote in message
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"Franz Heymann" <notfranz.heymann@btopenworld.com> wrote in message

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"Franz Heymann" <notfranz.heymann@btopenworld.com> wrote in message
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[snip]

Van Suid Afrika Franz?

Gebore en opgegvoed.
Maar ek bly in Engeland sedert 1947

Ek is in Johannesburg.

By Wits? Indien so, staf lid of student?

Neither. Sorry, my Afrikaans is kak. I'm an optometrist in private
practice. You?

I used to be a physics professor of London University physics

now

in my second childhood, since I retired in 1989

You two gentlemen will forgive me ... or maybe not ... but these
snippets of Afrikaans remind me of the English of Robert Burns or the
anonymous contemporary of Chaucer who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight: a made-up sounding creole at times oddly comprehensible.

What is a creole? It's a nice word I chose to use instead of "pidgin"
;-)

What is nasty about pidgin.

Before Afrikaans got its name it was referred to as "kombuis Hollands"

translates into "kitchen Dutch".

It is also, I think, distinguished from a pidgin by being an
invented hybrid spawned in the brains of larva exposed to two tongues
at some critical formative period, when the brain is ripe to create
language from babble; a "pidgin" is something made up by adults
desperate to communicate but exposed too late.

I was thinking of this recently ... God knows why ... and listed
Creole itself and Afrikaans as candidate creoles, then wondered why
English and Spanish don't seem to have formed one. Is it a cultural
thing, something best made in a smaller pot, or are my ideas kak?

Possibly. You have not expressed them clearly and simply enough for me to
judge.
The essence of Afrikaans is that it was developed from Dutch by the Dutch
settlers in South Africa. Those folk had only minimal, if any, formal
education, and Afrikaans developed essentially as a spoken means of
communication. Later, its was enriched by words provided by the French
Huguenots who settled there, as well as a selection of Malay words and
expressions inherited from the Malay slave population of the Cape. Much
later, it began to acquire a few words adapted from English. This last
accretion was (and probably still is) strenuously resisted by the

of the language. At present it is a fully fledged language with a well
defined grammar, a wide vocabularly (I did my first-year physics and

maths in Afrikaans at Cape Town University) and an extensive literature.

might interest you to know that one of the foremost Afrikaans authors,

Langenhoven, was very prolific. He was a fully fledged alcoholic. One

the leading local brethren of his home town decided to remonstrate him

his public drunkenness. He pointed his fingers at a long stretch of books
on his bookshelf and said: "Gentlemen, you are quite right. I wrote all
those books when I was inebriated. Now please point to all the books you
have written when you were sober."

Afrikaans is an extremely simple language. All but the essential vestiges
of grammar have been shorn off, and its spelling is totally phonetic. It
does, however have one or two joke words arising from the practice of
concatenation, like "seeeend" (sea gull) and
"besturendekommitteejaarvergaderingsverslagopsommingsformaat". (I hasten

say that nobody actually uses these!)

Now you might be in a position to tell me whether Afrikaans is a creole or

pidgin.

Oh yeah ... Yiddish: I've heard it described as Hebrew written in
German, but it has that weirdly semi-comprehensible made-up quality
which makes it sound more like a creole.

Franz

snip

Possibly. You have not expressed them clearly and simply enough for me to
judge.
The essence of Afrikaans is that it was developed from Dutch by the Dutch
settlers in South Africa. Those folk had only minimal, if any, formal
education, and Afrikaans developed essentially as a spoken means of
communication. Later, its was enriched by words provided by the French
Huguenots who settled there, as well as a selection of Malay words and
expressions inherited from the Malay slave population of the Cape. Much
later, it began to acquire a few words adapted from English. This last
accretion was (and probably still is) strenuously resisted by the

of the language. At present it is a fully fledged language with a well
defined grammar, a wide vocabularly (I did my first-year physics and

maths in Afrikaans at Cape Town University) and an extensive literature.

might interest you to know that one of the foremost Afrikaans authors,

Langenhoven, was very prolific. He was a fully fledged alcoholic. One

the leading local brethren of his home town decided to remonstrate him

his public drunkenness. He pointed his fingers at a long stretch of books
on his bookshelf and said: "Gentlemen, you are quite right. I wrote all
those books when I was inebriated. Now please point to all the books you
have written when you were sober."

Afrikaans is an extremely simple language. All but the essential vestiges
of grammar have been shorn off, and its spelling is totally phonetic. It
does, however have one or two joke words arising from the practice of
concatenation, like "seeeend" (sea gull) and
"besturendekommitteejaarvergaderingsverslagopsommingsformaat". (I hasten

say that nobody actually uses these!)

Now you might be in a position to tell me whether Afrikaans is a creole or

pidgin.

Oh yeah ... Yiddish: I've heard it described as Hebrew written in
German, but it has that weirdly semi-comprehensible made-up quality
which makes it sound more like a creole.

Franz