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Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by stavros on Saturday February 22, 2025 @04:59AM (#43137641)
That's probably because Afrikaans is Dutch, and Dutch is German.
Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by bradrn on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:12AM (#43137708)
Well, ‘is’ isn’t quite the right word… but they’re all closely related languages, yes, which is why I mentioned it.
Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by stavros on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:13AM (#43137715)
Yep, I was being liberal with "is" there, but hopefully the point came across.
Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by jessekv on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:25PM (#43143902)
Dutch is German, and English is French.
Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by stavros on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:38PM (#43143998)
English is French and German.
Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by jessekv on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:49PM (#43144091)
And therefore, Dutch is English :D
Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by stavros on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:53PM (#43144127)
No, English and Dutch are distant cousins.
Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by jessekv on Saturday February 22, 2025 @08:07PM (#43145135)
Haha ok- but then so is German. Dutch has Low Franconian origins, and the more you learn about it the weirder it gets. Also, it did not have the consonant shift- e.g. water (en) vs water (nl) vs wasser (de).

That said, after centuries of relative stability, modern Dutch is absorbing English words as fast as it can, who knows if it is still recognisable in 50 years.

Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by stavros on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:45PM (#43145892)
I don't know, I think maybe Dutch and German are more estranged siblings. English is a weird case because the German part is very German, but then the non-German part is pretty big!
Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by yapyap on Saturday February 22, 2025 @07:20AM (#43138341)
Afrikaans is Dutch yes, Dutch is not German.

Learn your languages before spreading unwise nonsense on the internet.

Re:Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? (2024) by carlmr on Saturday February 22, 2025 @07:40AM (#43138485)
Not OP here. You're right, but you could be more charitable in your reading of the previous comment. While it's wrong at the micro level it's not even nonsense on the macro level. Dutch and German are at the very least very related. They share a lot of constructs and words.

There's no reason to be so disrespectful.