Re: Volcae and Volsci

> > Afrikaans is the mother tongue of a large black and colored
> > population. In that population it started as a pidgin. Brian is
> > now going to pronounce that he knew that already.
> >
> I'm wondering if Afrikaans is the same among the
> Tswana and Coloured people who speak it.

In one TV feature of nasty criminals in the SA prison system I could
make out very little of the Afrikaans those street gang people used,
from the Afrikaans of the wardens I could pick out a little more.
There was obviously a large difference.

BTW I heard from a white South African that SA English picked up words
from Afrikaans like 'lekker' "nice". 'That's lecker!'.

> I used to
> work with a Tswana who was form Johannesburg. He told
> me Afrikaans was his first language and he had to
> learn Tswana from his grandparents, that most of the
> Black population of the Rand cities spoke Afrikaans.

I watch boxing occasionally on cable on ARD, the German first channel.
Usually they they set up someone to translate what the challenger and
his coach are talking about between rounds. Once they had to give up
though, the challenger was a black South African and it turned out he
talked with his coach in Afrikaans. The TV guys had automatically
assumed they would be speaking English and not the supposed language
of the oppressor, as the mostly Anglophone press wants it to be (they
can never forgive the Boers for what they did to them in the Boer war).

> But it would be interesting to know if it's really Afrikaans for a
> pidgenized form.

Erh, meaning...?


Torsten