After you learn how to pronounce her name, you can hear how the Afrikaans language sounds. According to a comment in the Reddit thread, "90% - 95% of Afrikaan words are Dutch, but it also has some Malay, Portuguese, etc. Most people who know Dutch can still (partially) understand it though."
"Dis baie moeilik om in Afrikaans te praat as daar net een persoon is wat Afrikaans praat en niemand praat terug nie, so dis 'n bietjie snaaks om in die taal te praat."
"It is very difficult to speak in Afrikaans if there is only one person who can speak Afrikaans and nobody talks back, so it's a bit funny to talk in this language."
Piers Morgan is the slimiest human being I've ever encountered... Makes my skin crawl.
ReplyDeleteTo my Finnish ear it sounds like Swedish. Probably because of the "prat" sounding word she keeps repeating.
ReplyDeleteThey often don't conjugate the verbs (I walk, you walk, he walk, we walk), and the use a double negation (I not walk not), which sounds nice. They have coined some funny words like langnekkameel (longneckcamel) for a giraffe, and moltrein (moletrain) for metro. To me, Afrikaans is much better understandable than when somebody from the Dutch province of Friesland starts talking Frisian.
ReplyDeleteprecedent: Romans and Greeks called the giraffe 'camelopardalis' because they believed(or were just kidding, who knows) that the beast was an unnatural hybrid of a camel and a leopard.
ReplyDeleteHippopotamus='river horse'
also, have we seen this here?(can't remember):
www youtube com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34
I am Afrikaans and out of experience I can tell that Flemish is much closer to Afrikaans than Dutch.
ReplyDeleteA giraffe is 'kameelperd' (camel+horse)
Hippopotamus is 'seekoei' (sea+cow)
Such a fun language.