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by buyx 1025 days ago
It's interesting that the page says that Afrikaans was derived from Dutch in the 20th century, but the two languages are so different.

Dutch: Ik kan glas eten. Het doet geen pijn. Afrikaans: Ek kan glas eet, dit maak my nie seer nie

The truth, of course, is that Afrikaans split off from Dutch centuries earlier, but it wasn't a "prestige language" until the 20th century.

The page comes from a more innocent time, when the internet hadn't hit critical mass, and you could get away with stuff like that without pedants fact-checking you to death.

2 comments

There's not reliably one way to translate something, and there could be Dutch versions much closer to the one shown here in Afrikaans, such as: "dat doet mij niet zeer". Regardless, the Afrikaanse version is already very readable to my Dutch eyes. So much that its misleading about how close the languages really are, because as you say, they have well diverged, and while there's a lot of similarities, there's also plenty of space for native speakers of either language to miss the gist of what's being said in the other language.
The Afrikaans version may be comprehensible to a Dutch speaker, but the Dutch version, even the version you posted, is still very hard for this (second-language) Afrikaans reader to understand.
Thank you for that insight, which, thanks to my ignorance, is surprising!
As a first language Afrikaans speaker, both sentences are perhaps somewhat difficult to parse, but also very readable to my eyes.
Oh it’s lovely though isn’t it? It’s like gravity, it seems inexorable. Being incorrect in front of enough eyes is a path towards correctness. Oft a painful one, but almost always informative.