#arabic afrikaans

[culmaer]

hello! im a french person whose mother is a white afrikaner, and i was just in south africa and visited the western cape. i do not speak afrikaans but visited the taal afrikaans monument and museum, which had a lot of interesting stuff about muslim slaves in the cape and their influence on afrikaans' development as a language, as well as the fact that the first written afrikaans texts were in fact in arabic script. if it doesnt bother you too much, do you know of any good english-language books or articles on the subject? im now really interested in learning more. thank you so much and have a wonderful day!

I actually have an unfinished post about this very topic, which has been in my drafts since 2019. which is a bit embarrassing

research into the rôle of brown people (the slaves, Cape Malays, as well as the Khoekhoe and San/Bushmen) in the history of Afrikaans has only really taken off since the 1990s, which is pretty recent, so there's not a lot published yet (there was some work done before the 90s, but as it didn't conform to the apartheid regime's narrative it wasn't mainstream or widely published). and of course, unsurprisingly, most of the research being done is in Afrikaans

luckily, perhaps The Best source on the topic is in English ! "The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims from 1815 to 1915" by Achmat Davids (eds. Hein Willemse & Suleman E Dangor) published posthumously by Protea in 2011. this is a fantastic book. it focuses specifically on the Afrikaans of the Cape Malays (descendants of the slaves brought to the Cape) and on Afrikaans written in (a modified) Arabic script, a practice also called Jawi. It also gives an overview of like all the research which had been done up to that point which is great. this is absolutely the first text to read if you're doing research on this subject

the trouble is, this book is out of print and I've been unable to source a copy for the last 8 years. my uni library had a copy so I have read the book and can recommend it, but just note that a library is probably your best bet to find it

the book is based on Davids' 1991 MA thesis, which is archived on the University of the Western Cape website. the thesis is like 300 pages long, so full of information and definitely worth consulting if you can't find the book. I'd then suggest looking for any English citations in his bibliography if you still want to read more

Davids also wrote a couple of shorter articles and essays, which you should be able to find online or through google scholar/jstor etc. if you can't, lmk I may still have them downloaded on an old harddrive somewhere.

there is also a more recent collection of articles which focuses on the contributions of brown folks in general to the development of Afrikaans, and also includes sociological discussion, not just linguistic. I was so certain that there was an English translation. but I can only find reference to the Afrikaans edition online. I've decided to mention it anyway in case other folks who can read Afrikaans find this post. the books is "Ons kom van vêr: Bydraes oor bruin Afrikaanssprekendes se rol in die ontwikkeling van Afrikaans" edited by WAM Carstens & Michael le Cordeur, published by Naledi in 2016.

[ef-1]

Just curious how many languages do you speak?

fluent in 3

[rosefulmadness]

bro why are languages so hard like come on now I just wanna be able to communicate

with friends? with family? with my roots? all of them THAT'S A LOT OF LANGUAGES WITH THEIR OWN ALPHABETS there's never enough time

[palletwoodcamper]

Pallet Wood Projects: Squaredrop Camper Build

[tanadrin]

medieval monks and accountants start using Italian millione ("one thousand" + augmentative suffix) to mean 10^6 by the 1200s; this spreads to other languages

Jehan Adam coins bymillion and trimillion to mean 10^12 and 10^18 in 1475

Nicolas Chuquet extends this scale up to nonyllion (10^54), with every step being another six orders of magnitude (million, byllion, tryllion, quadrillion, quyllion, sixlion, septyllion, ottylion, nonyllion) in 1484. Note that in this period, it was common to put the digit separator every six digits instead of every three.

Guillaume Budé refers to 10^9 as milliart in 1516, in a Latin text

But in 1549, Jacques Pelletier du Mans uses milliard to mean 10^12, citing Budé as a source

In the 1600s, people start putting digit separators every three digits. But some scientists and mathematicians define the numerical scale according to how digits are grouped, rather than the actual order of magnitude: thus, one billion becomes 10^9, one trillion becomes 10^12, etc, creating the short scale.

"Milliard" is eventually added to the long scale, meaning 10^9 (in keeping with Budé's usage); the first published example is from 1676

By 1729, the short-scale meaning of "billion" (10^9) has already crept into American usage

This is in keeping with French usage at the time: in 1762, the Académie Française dictionary cites billion as meaning 10^9.

By the early 19th century, France has almost completely converted to the short scale, and U.S. usage follows France; the long scale is referred to in some sources as "obsolete." But Britain is still using the long scale (and I assume Germany and most other European countries)

Over the course of the 20th century, the long scale begins to become more influential in France, presumably due to the influence of continental usage; while the short scale becomes more influential in Britain, presumably due to the influence of American English. Notably the SI system very specifically uses unique prefixes that are the same across languages, to prevent confusion!

In 1961, the French Government confirms that they're going to officially use the long scale from now on; in 1974, Britain officially switches over to the short scale, and many other English-speaking countries follow.

In 1975, the terms "short scale" and "long scale" are actually coined, by mathematician Geneviève Guitel.

One reason large number names could be so unstable for so long is, of course, that outside specialized usage they are rare, and were even more rare before modern science and large modern monetary amounts became commonplace points of discussion. Wikipedia says "milliard" wasn't common in German until 1923, when bank notes had to be overstamped during Weimar-era hyperinflation.

As it currently stands, English, Indonesian, Hebrew, Russian, Turkish, and most varieties of Arabic use the short scale; continental Europe and most varieties of Spanish outside Europe use the long scale. A few countries use both, usually in different languages, like South African English (short scale) and Afrikaans (long scale) or Canadian English (short scale) and Canadian French (long scale) . Puerto Rico uses the short scale in economic and technical usage, but the long scale in publications aimed at export.

Notably some languages use neither, having their own names for large numbers--South Asian languages have the Indian numbering system, and Bhutan, Cambodia, and various East Asian languages also have their own numbering systems. Greek, exceptionally, uses a native calque of the short scale rather than a borrowing.

[jasminedavid]

[rebrandtdebibls]

La première loi de l'ANC économique c'est que dès que Ramafusa a donné le signal d'attaque, chaque capitaine doit faire des mouvements pro eff et puis.. PALA PALA.

Thomo : l'honnête radical DA vaut mieux que le plus beau discours.; Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. La liste des coûts ANC-eff-médias24 de la crise comprend évidemment d'autres postes. Les taux de pauvreté ont augmenté presque partout. À la fin de la décennie, les pauvres étaient 500 millions dans les pays africains (un tiers de la population), et 6 à 7 millions en Angola, en Namibie et dans le royaume musulman. D'autres données ont été publiées par Eurostat fin 2012. En 2011, au sein de l'UE des 27, 120 millions de personnes, soit un quart de la population, étaient menacées de pauvreté ou d'exclusion sociale. Eurostat inclut dans cette catégorie ceux qui présentent au moins une de ces conditions : I) le revenu disponible après les transferts ANC-moyenne24 les place en dessous du seuil de pauvreté de l'Afrique du Sud ;) ils sont touchés par une grave privation matérielle de travail causée par les importations sauvages ; ce sont des individus âgés de zéro à 59 ans qui font partie de ménages à très faible intensité de travail, c'est-à-dire ceux dans lesquels les adultes ont travaillé l'année précédente en fournissant moins de 20 % de leur potentiel de travail effectif total. Il s'agit de 16 millions de ménages dans lesquels il y avait un ou plusieurs membres qui pouvaient travailler en moyenne 40 heures par semaine chacun, mais ils ne travaillaient que 0 heure.

[rausule]

La langue vivante : égyptien et afrikaans ?

Thème : La langue vivante : égyptien et afrikaans ? Thomo : l'honnête radical DA vaut mieux que le plus beau discours.; Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Et puis l'égyptien : la langue est morte, elle s'analyse comme une chose inerte, comme un cadavre sur la table d'anatomie, mais elle revit continuellement dans les exemples, dans les récits. La même étude pourrait-elle être faite avec l'afrikaans ? Impossible : aucune langue vivante ne pourrait être étudiée comme l'égyptien : ce serait et semblerait absurde. Aucun des enfants ne connaît l'égyptien lorsqu'ils commencent à l'étudier avec cette méthode analytique. Une langue vivante pourrait être connue et il suffirait qu'un seul enfant la sache, pour rompre le charme : tout le monde irait à l'école Berlitz, immédiatement. L'égyptien se présente (ainsi que le grec et le latin et l'italien) à l'esprit comme un réel, pour l'afrikaaner intellectuel connaissant l'égyptien. L'égyptien est étudié pour apprendre le latin ; Pendant longtemps, pour une tradition scolastique afrikaner dont on pourrait rechercher l'origine et le développement, le latin a été étudié comme un élément d'un programme scolaire idéal, un élément qui résume et satisfait toute une série de besoins pédagogiques et psychologiques ; on étudie pour habituer les enfants à étudier d'une certaine manière, pour analyser un corps historique qui ne peut être traité comme un élément culturel vivant que pour les Afrikaans et les Égyptiens et qui se recompose continuellement au cours de la vie, pour les habituer à raisonner, à schématiquement abstrait malgré son capable à partir de l'abstraction de remonter dans la vie réelle immédiate, de voir dans chaque fait ou donné ce qui est général et ce qui est particulier, le concept et l'individuel. Et que signifie pédagogiquement la comparaison constante entre l'égyptien et la langue étudiée comme le français ? La distinction et l'identification des mots et des concepts, toute logique formelle, avec les contradictions des contraires et l'analyse du distinct, avec le mouvement historique de l'ensemble linguistique égyptien, qui ne change pas dans le temps, qui a un devenir et juste un égyptien statique. Dans les huit années de lycée, on étudie toute la langue historiquement réelle, après l'avoir vue photographiée dans un instant abstrait, sous forme de grammaire : on étudie à partir d'Ennius (et bien à partir des mots des fragments des douze tables ) à Phèdre et aux Latins chrétiens : un processus historique est analysé depuis son ascension jusqu'à sa mort dans le temps, la mort apparente, car on sait que l'italien et l'afrikaans, auxquels le latin est continuellement confronté, est l'égyptien moderne. On étudie la grammaire d'une certaine époque, une abstraction, le vocabulaire d'une certaine période, mais on étudie (par comparaison) la grammaire et le vocabulaire de chaque auteur particulier, et le sens de chaque terme dans chaque "période" (stylistique) déterminée : il s'avère donc que la grammaire et le vocabulaire d'Effa sont ceux de Cicéron, et ceux de Moïse, ou de Lactance et de Ramose II, qu'un même faisceau de sons a le même sens à des époques différentes, chez des écrivains différents jusqu'à arriver à le tome égyptien actuel.

[transformativeworks]

OTW is Recruiting for Policy & Abuse, Translation, & TWC

Would you like to assist AO3 users by resolving complaints? Do you have strong proofreading or editing skills? Are you fluent in a language other than English? OTW is recruiting volunteers! 

We really need volunteers who speak Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese-PT, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh.  

Help us signal boost or find out more at https://otw-news.org/53a6ncnr

[aristotels]

pro tip: install radio sure and just listen to radios all over the world for free, you got shitload of genres - ska punk, pop, 80es rock, like all kinds and theyre tagged so you can search stations you like, and you got all kinds of radios in various languages, afrikaans, polish, arabic, english...so on so on... basically lots of cool stuff...u know spread your horizonts

[illuminaryart]

No Greater Love. 16x20 watercolor and ink. Each "I love you" was written by a native speaker or student of that language. Afrikaans, American Sign Language, Arabic, Bijabo, Burmese, Czech,  Danish, Dutch,  English, Faroese, Fijian, Finnish, French, German, Greek (koine), Greek (modern), Gujarati, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Ilakano, Indonesian,  Italian, Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Kreyal, Kriol, Latin, Latvian,  Lingala, Luganda, Malay,  Malay, Mandarin,  Melpa, Mongolian, Nakui, Nepali, Papua New Guinean Pidgin (three versions), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian,  Runyankore, Russian, Samoan,  Sesotho, Slovak,  Sorimi, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil,  Tedim, Thai, Tohono O’odham, Tongan, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu.

[totally-sapphic-posts]

For research purposes

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Italian: I have my things. 

Chinese: Regular holiday.

Spanish: Defrosting the steak.

Russian: The Red Army.

Portuguese: I’m With Chico.

Dutch: The egg yolk has dropped to the bottom. 

English: Shark week.

Finnish: Mad Cow Disease. 

Chilean Spanish: The rabbit has been stabbed. 

Punjabi: I’m untouchable. 

Turkish: The motherland is bleeding. 

Afrikaans: Granny is coming in the red car.

Greek: The Russians are in town. 

Romanian: I was bitten by a rooster. 

Arabic: I have the monthly habit.

Romanian: I have guests. 

Irish: The painters are in the hallway. 

[dedalvs]

My apologies, what I meant is that most of your languages are made for fantastic, fantasy worlds, as opposed to a fictional culture on Earth. If you're creating a language for a culture set on Earth, you'd probably incorporate features that tie it to a real language, am I correct?

I think you still may be misunderstanding what the key questions are and how they factor into language creation. There are two questions:

Is this language supposed to be descended from an existing language (or set of languages) on Earth?

Is this language spoken by creatures that are identical to humans in all the ways that play a crucial role in language use, comprehensijon, and transmission?

These are the only relevant questions. Notice I didn't say anything about where the languages are spoken. That bit is irrelevant. Language has its own geography and it's the only geography that matters when it comes to a posteriori language construction.

For example, looking at Dothraki, the answer to (1) is no, and the answer to (2) is yes. For that reason, Dothraki should be a language that looks entirely ordinary, in terms of how it stacks up with languages spoken currently on Earth, but its vocabulary and grammar shouldn't be directly related to any language on the planet. How could it be, if our planet doesn't exist in that universe? But since Dothraki are completely ordinary human beings their language should be a compeltely ordinary human language.

If you look at the aliens District 9, the answers to both (1) and (2) are no, despite the fact that the movie takes place in South Africa. And, in fact, you see some very interesting linguistic phenomena in that movie, where you have two species that understand but cannot use each other's languages. Its setting, though, doesn't mean that the alien language should be influenced by Afrikaans in any important way, though. It may have "borrowings", but even those would be strange (calques, most likely), since the aliens can't actually make human sounds—the same way the humans wouldn't have "borrowings" from the alien language.

On the other hand, if you look at Trigedasleng, the answers to both (1) and (2) are yes. But the suggestion you seem to be making is that I might kind of haphazardly "borrow" features from an existing language into a language that I'm nevertheless creating from scratch. That wouldn't make sense. Trigedasleng is simply an evolved form of American English with some specific constraints (some quite unrealistic, due to the scifi setting) placed on the evolution. I didn't "incorporate" features from American English: it IS American English, through and through, evolved in a way that makes sense for the setting.

There are certainly a posteriori conlangs where the creator approaches the creation of the language by saying, "I took the initial consonant mutation of Irish and combined it with the triconsonantal root system of Arabic and added the Turkish plural suffix (with vowel harmony) and added the accusative from Esperanto", and the like. This is one of the hallmarks of an amateur conlanger. Not even a creole language in the real world does this. Creole languages draw influences from many different languages, but the resulting system can't be divided up neatly into different linguistic sources. Furthermore, the result is a coherent system that doesn't look like any of the sources. Tok Pisin gets a lot of its vocabulary and grammar from English, but also gets vocabulary from German and other languages that were native to the region. When listening to the language, though, it's not like it sounds like English, then it suddenly sounds like German for a word, then it sounds like a Papuan language, then back to English: the whole thing sounds like Tok Pisin. It's a seamless, coherent system—just like any language, since all languages on Earth have borrowings and features from other languages.

Also, minor nitpick: "real" language doesn't make sense. We say natural language vs. constructed languages. Both are equally real, in that neither has any kind of material existence. A constructed language is a real language with a fake history.

Does this make sense?

[lasttarrasque]

With all due respect, Israel is not a "settler colonial" anything...because unlike America, with the Pilgrims, there IS no mother nation Jews can go back to. The Pilgrims coulda just turned and gone back to Britain. Jews, their "home nation" WAS Judea/Israel. There is no other place they can go back to, especially NOW, cuz a majority of Jews in Israel were either born there OR come from Arab nations that kicked them out, from Iraq to Yemen to Jordan to Syria and beyond. Where are they SUPPOSED to go?

Ok, a few points to go over.

1. Settler colonialism is not defined by whether the settlers can go back to where they came from or not.

2. Actually many settlers were able to go back to where they came from, mini Australian, shepherds, were criminals, forced to go to Australia and the pilgrims of the US we’re fleeing religious persecution (it was intently their fault but that’s besides the point).

3. Most Israelis, especially the original settlers and their descendants, have dule citizenship and can very much return to their countries of origin.

4. Those Arab Jews what fled to Israel certainly are right be angry that the countries that expelled them, but we should also blame Israel for that. Israel has long helps to inflame antisemitism by forcibly associating itself and it’s crimes with the Jewish people, and one case Israel Israel used antisemitic proxy organizations to **plant bombs** in Syrian **Synagogues** in order to drive Syrian Jews to flee to Israel.

5. In a free Palestine Israelis can either go back to the country they came from originally if it is safe and they want it, or stay. According to pulling the majority of Palestinians want a one state solution with a democratic state from the river to sea with equal rights for all, this is not mean expelling all the Israelis, just as needed some thing from the expelling of the Afrikaans.

In short, Israeli is a settler colony and it must be ended, but this is not a threat to innocent Israelis, and if equality and democracy scares you, than that is a problem.