digilante napisał(a):
You make some excellent points, and I need to correct my statements as they came out wrong. I was trying to be overly simplistic, thinking nobody here knows any better, so no need to go into details. Nice to know my presumption was wrong

Well, thank you... or dank je, or however you say that in Afrikaans... .
Cytuj:
The bibles that the first Arikaners had were apparently in High Dutch (as you say, at literary level). Given the lower average education of those who came to South Africa, and their difficulty in passing on that knowledge to their children and to black persons (especially after the Great Trek from current Cape Town to current Pretoria), over time High Dutch was completely forgotten. The language was simplified - you are correct - there is almost no inflection at all - you just speak, no need to think too much.
you're saying that 'tongue in cheek', aren't you? No thinking about inflexions sure, but the rest?
I ploughed my way through a few Afr. essays on things legal etc., it was quite all right, not like coming from some uncivilised 'boors'... . The few Afrikaanders I met in life were nice and approachable, helpful even, and civil.
Cytuj:
Anyway, I'm not qualified to get into deeper details really, but the fact is that both myself and my South African friends got exactly those comments from Dutch persons - that we sound archaic. Whether those Dutch persons are qualified to call it archaic is another story! Maybe it just sounds weird to them, and that's all they can relate it to.
Well, I have no doubt that there many archaisms in Afrikaans, maybe more dialectal archaisms than Bible-style archaisms but still
Cytuj:
Not sure if one could call it a dialect of Afrikaans, but in Cape Town, the "coloured" people (mix of white, black, asian, indian from a long time ago) speak what we call Cape Flats Afrikaans. Cape Flats because they all live in the flat area between Table Mountain and the mountain range out towards Stellenbosch. This Afrikaans is fairly standard, but is spoken with a hilarious accent, and has the richest, most superb, vocabulary for insulting people of any language I know (yeah, even Polish)
Downtrodden, humiliated races often develop rich vocabulary of curses, insults and so on. In our (i. e. the Poles') case it's just as often *thinking of ourselves* as downtrodden, though.
Cytuj:
I will not translate the following as it would be simply offensive, but I think enough people do not know Afrikaans to ignore the meaning and concentrate on just the written visual form:
"Naai man! Gaan vrek! Jy was deur jou ma se gat gebore want haar poes was te besig!"
Imagine the scene: Two of these guys, drunk out of their minds, standing on opposite street corners, and screaming at each other above the noise of traffic.
The above would be pronounced as if you were very drunk, had a grip around your testicles, as follows (read as if you were reading Polish - jak sie pisze tak sie czyta, H ma byc takie jakbys czyscil sobie gardlo przed splunieciem):
"Naaaaaj maaaan! Haaan frek! Dzej was djuuur jooou-ma-se-Hat Hebuore want haar puuuuuus was te bjesiHHHH!"

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Strong indeed. What is 'vrek' though? (Unless it's too offensive...). Funny it says 'ma se'; the Dutch say 'ma 'r', or 'ma haar' (full form), 'pa z'n', 'se' is obviously 'z'n'. Mother HIS a...?
As regards English influence on Polish, some say those Polish children who are taught English at an early age (say 3 or thereabouts) are hard put to learn how to pronounce the letter 'r' in Polish the Polish fashion (i.e rolled with the tip of your tongue), the English 'r' being much easier to pronounce. This I heard from second-hand, can't confirm or disconfirm it myself. What I myself have observed, though, was that even young adults who have been in UK for a long time start pronouncing 't', 'p' or 'k' in words as 'taki', 'patyk', 'kosz' the English way, i. e. with a faint 'h' after the consonant: thaki, phatyk, khosz, which is absolutely uncharacteristic of Polish in any of its native variants.