The Influence of English on Afrikaans

3.1 Works written prior to 1900

3.1.1 A.N.E. Changuion's De Nederduitsche Taal in Zuid-Afrika hersteld, zijnde een handleiding tot de kennis dier taal, naar de plaatselijke behoefte van het land gewijzigd (1844, second edition 1848)

Changuion (1803-1881), whom Pheiffer (1979: 12) calls the first bewuste dokumenteerder of the influence of English on Afrikaans, was professor of classical and modern languages at the Zuid-Afrikaansche Atheneum, later to become the University of Cape Town. He had left Holland for South Africa at the end of 1831 and had become concerned about Dutch at the Cape. In 1842, out of protest against the favouritism shown for English at the Atheneum, he resigned and founded his own Dutch medium institute.

[p. 87]

It was at this time that the book under discussion here appeared.¹ Although Changuion aimed ultimately at helping to rid Cape Dutch of its ‘impurities’ - he clearly did not yet recognise Afrikaans as separate from Dutch - his preface makes it obvious he was not terribly optimistic about reinstating the linguistic norms of Holland in South Africa.

At the end of his Dutch grammar, which consists of 246 pages, he adds a Proeve van Kaapsch Taaleigen which, after introductory comments covering four pages, consists of a list of South African words and expressions covering twenty-one pages (vii-xxvi). It is the Proeve, not the preceding grammar, which is of importance to the history of Afrikaans. The following comments have been taken from the introduction to the Proeve:

‘Het hoofddoel van de volgende verzameling, gelijk men al dadelijk uit den titel van ons werk kan afleiden, was om het Nederduitsch, voor zoo ver de taal, die in deze Kolonie gesproken wordt, dien naam dragen mag, van deels geheel vreemde, deels verminkte woorden en spreekwijzen te zuiweren, of althans den weg daartoe aan te wijzen... Dat deze verzameling onvolledig is, bekennen wij gaarne... In enkele gevallen hebben wij een afleiding gewaagd.’ (p. iii-vi)

The alphabetical list consists of 424 lemmas of which 32 are marked (E); occasionally he inconsistently omits the symbol but English influence is nevertheless obvious or implied, for example: ‘dressen, wkw; kleeden: ik ga my dressen.’ (p. xi) There are 14 such examples plus another 4 which to my mind may be English, for example: ‘schoon, geheel: ik heb het schoon vergeten. In Holland zegt men glad vergeten.’ (p. xxii)² In other words, circa 12% of the very limited list of words and expressions which Changuion considered worthy of mention are attributable to English influence. Many of these words are no longer current in Afrikaans and the nature of the Proeve is so sketchy that it cannot be regarded as a reliable account of the extent to which English had already begun to affect Dutch at the Cape at that time. It can merely serve as an indication that the influence had indeed begun, but more importantly this book stands at the beginning of a long tradition of prescriptive works that will attempt to ‘cleanse’ Dutch/Afrikaans of English influence. In this respect it is an exceedingly important book. Even the author's resignation to the possible hopelessness of his task, i.e. to purify the language, is a first admission in the writings on

1 These biographical details were gleaned from Nienaber (1950: 17-22).

2 Although Changuion obviously found this use of schoon strange enough to warrant comment, for it does correspond with the English idiom, Van Dale recognises geheel as one of the meanings of schoon and the cognate is used in a similar way in Frisian.

[p. 88]

anglicisms that many were here to stay - in other words that the contact with English had given rise to a degree of linguistic change in the Dutch of the Cape. There is still, over 140 years later, an unwillingness to recognise that this is the case.

Changuion's lemmas are on the whole relatively uninteresting from a modern point of view, because subsequent purism has eradicated many of them from the language; alternatively, they may never have been as ingeburger as he thought. After all, Mansvelt (1884: iv), writing only 40 years later, commented:

‘Echter heb ik geen enkel woord van hem [Changuion] overgenomen zonder het eerst behoorlijk te toetsen, aangezien men bij hem woorden als eigenaardig Kaapsch-Hollandsch vindt opgegeven, die òf ook in Nederlands algemeen bekend zijn, òf die men hier volstrekt niet kent, althans 't tegenwoordige geslacht niet.’

A few are significant because they do still exist and some of them will become the subject of much debate over the next 140 odd years; it is useful to know that they were already current at the Cape in Changuion's time, for example: blijven (= woon), bottel, dat is een mooije een, inbreken (horses), lijn (= reël), een wandeling nemen, partikulier (= kieskeurig), policeman, ik ben regt, settelaar.

3.1.2 N. Mansvelt's Proeve van een Kaapsch-Hollandsch Idioticon, met toelichting en opmerkingen betreffende Land, Volk en Taal (1884)

Nienaber (1950: 71-72) calls this work ‘die belangrikste van alle versamelings sover’ (i.e. up to 1884) and ‘die volledigste, noukeurigste en mees wetenskaplike byeenbrenging van Afrikaanse idiotismes wat tot 1884 onderneem is.’ Mansvelt collected his corpus over a ten year period. His position and concern for Dutch were similar to Changuion's, but his corpus presents merely a list without didactic commentary blatantly aimed at purification, unlike Changuion's, and apparently nothing else on the topic appeared in the intervening years, i.e. nothing that sheds further light on anglicisms in Afrikaans. He makes use of Changuion's list although his own is much more extensive. Nienaber (1950: 72) maintains, however:

‘Van sy eie lys van 188 bladsye geld ook al wat hy van dr. Changuion se Proeve sê, nl. dat sommige woorde en uitdruk-

[p. 89]

kinge volstrek onbekend is, “althans (onder) 't tegenwoordige geslacht”.’

Mansvelt also deals with pronunciation, not just vocabulary and expressions, and works comparatively with Dutch dialects to explain certain phenomena - already a hint of what was to be required of later linguists interested in the factors that had shaped Afrikaans. In the introduction he states:

‘Een ieder die enigszins met 't Kaapsch-Hollandsch bekend is, zal terstond ontdekken, dat er hier geen melding gemaakt wordt van zoo vele Engelsche woorden die men dikwijls, al of niet geradbraakt, in 't dagelijksch gesprek hoort bezigen. Daar zulke woorden òf uit traagheid òf uit een beklagenswaardige modezucht alleen gebruikt worden door hem, die liever een vreemd dan een eenvoudig Kaapsch of Nederlandsch woord gebruiken, heb ik gemeend, dit werkje niet te moeten ontsieren door er een aantal meest mismaakte woorden in op te nemen, die men onvervalscht in elk Engelsch woordenboek kan vinden.’ (p. v)

Nevertheless, he does include quite a number of English loanwords in his list. He states that he applies four classifications to his corpus: 1) local words arising out of local needs, 2) Dutch words that have undergone a shift in meaning in South Africa, 3) archaisms that have since disappeared from standard Dutch, 4) words borrowed from foreign languages, mainly from Malay.

His corpus consists of some 2,000 entries of which only about 50 are English words or structures - a much lower proportion than was the case with Changuion's Proeve. One should not, however, therefore conclude that English influence had lessened - quite the contrary - but his comment on page v cited above may be the explanation.

Although Mansvelt's work is an important milestone in the history of Afrikaans linguistics, it is only of very limited use to a study of anglicisms in Afrikaans today, once again because so much of what he describes is no longer current in Afrikaans. Nevertheless, some of his comments are interesting in the light of later studies that deal with the same points, more often than not without reference to the fact that Mansvelt had dealt with them as early as 1884, for example: on page 1 he discusses the o a pronunciation of long a and connects it with Dutch dialects. This pronunciation of a in Afrikaans has since been the cause of considerable debate, with suggestions that it is a shift caused by contact with English (Louw 1981: 263; Du Plessis 1983: 58). Aangaan (voortgaan) is another

[p. 90]

much debated word which Mansvelt attributes to archaic Dutch. He does not, however, discuss the meaning ‘to happen’ which the word also commonly has these days. (cf. p. 184) He mentions braaf as meaning zeer, erg (nowadays bra in Afrikaans, e.g. Hy is bra gesteld op sy werk - he's rather conscientious about his work) but does not mention the meaning ‘brave’; at times what he does not mention can be as illuminating as what he does. He comments that danki is used as in English, for example: ja - danki (Dutch alsjeblieft) and nee-dankie (Dutch dank je/u). (cf. 7.29.2)

His commentary is not limited merely to linguistics but also refers to customs etc. which are typically South African. For example, under the lemma diep (sheep dip) he adds: ‘Vooral in die Oostelijke Provincie gebruikelijk, waar de Engelsche invloed 't sterkst is’ (p. 33), thus presumably more than in Cape Town.

Mansvelt takes up the point of long e being raised in the Boland and attributes it to English influence. (cf. Van Rensburg 1983: 142) He also discusses the use of een after an adjective, claiming it occurs in both English and Frisian, and sees eenig (any) as being in navolging van 't Engelsch. (p. 41) Many modern prescriptive grammars are still trying to oppose the use of groei as a transitive verb; Mansvelt observed the very same phenomenon. It is therefore clearly of long standing and yet it seems to have been combatted with a considerable degree of success. Under the lemma passábel (of rivers) he comments:

't Is vreemd dat dit woord, hoe Fr. 't ook klinkt en lijkt, niet in 't Fr. bestaat, noch, zoo ver mij bekend is, bestaan heeft. Alleen in 't Eng. heeft passable soortgelijken zin, doch 't is ondenkbaar, dat een woord als dit, waaraan men sedert de stichting der kolonie behoefte had, eerst in later tijd aan de Eng. zou ontleend zijn. 't Schijnt dus hier gevormd te zijn. Ook de uitspraak pleit tegen Eng. afkomst.’ (p. 123-4)

This passage is interesting firstly, because of the reasons - incorrect in my opinion - he gives for it not being English and secondly, because it is the first, and one of only very few references in the literature on anglicisms to the existence of items of vocabulary in Afrikaans that appear to be of French origin and are thus regarded as inherited through Dutch, when in fact they are English loanwords in disguise. (cf. 7.12.1)