Oo and ee

[Aleco]

I am curious how you would categorize these sounds (oo/ee). To me, they sound just like the way we pronounce long å and e in my part of the country.

With an /ie/-ish sound (ee) and an /Oo/-ish sound (oo).

[Reinder]

I would say 'oo' is more like /oə/ and 'ee' is more like /eə/.
The real 'long e' would be an 'ê' for me, I guess.

[Aleco]

Okay. Truth be told, I've never been able to write that sound properly. The first element sounds like something between /e/ and /i/ to me

[Reinder]

Okay. Truth be told, I've never been able to write that sound properly. The first element sounds like something between /e/ and /i/ to me

Yeah, I know what you mean, I also hear something like an /i/. I never actually learned Afrikaans, maybe Leviwosc can explain this or even better, a native speaker.

[Dminor]

I think they are [u.ə] and [i.ə], respectively. At least that's what I pronounce when trying to speak Afrikaans

[Shiba]

Dminor is pretty much right.

For an English close-to-equivalent of the "ee" sound, try the "ea" in "ea" (Commonwealth pronunciation, mind, not American).

I can't think of an equivalent of the "oo" though, not in English or Norwegian.
Aleco, all the Norwegian I've heard pronounces the "å" like the Afrikaans "ô", not "oo".

(By the way, you'll see several instances of "oë" in Afrikaans. This is pronounced [uə]. "Oo" is a "smoother" sound, in a way, but you can't go wrong if you say [uə] for "oo".)

[Aleco]

Thank you for your answer I really find Afrikaans nice, but every single South African person I have ever met (like 10 probably), all speak either English or Xhosa

From what part(s) of the Netherlands did the "boeren" move? I assume that's where some of the linguistic traits came from.

[Shiba]

No problem. Huh, that's interesting, I have yet to meet a single Xhosa online. Or in real life, for that matter, since they mostly live in the Eastern Cape and I'm in Gauteng, which is pretty far off. Not that I've never seen a Xhosa person in my life, but I can't recall ever having specifically spoken to one.

I'm not sure which part(s) of the Netherlands the Boere came from, actually, but I'm assuming it was southern, since Afrikaans is in some ways even nearer to Flemish than to Dutch, and it's pretty far from German (and East and North Frisian - not sure about West, don't know enough about it). Afrikaans has also been influenced quite a lot by French, though, but I can't speak French at all so I don't know how it influenced Afrikaans exactly. ^^;;

There may be a clue in the common Afrikaans surnames - we've got plenty of "Van"s - but I don't know the Netherlands (especially not the Netherlands of the 1600s and 1700s) well enough to make much of them. ^^;;

[Reinder]

I'm not sure which part(s) of the Netherlands the Boere came from, actually, but I'm assuming it was southern, since Afrikaans is in some ways even nearer to Flemish than to Dutch, and it's pretty far from German (and East and North Frisian - not sure about West, don't know enough about it). Afrikaans has also been influenced quite a lot by French, though, but I can't speak French at all so I don't know how it influenced Afrikaans exactly. ^^;;

There may be a clue in the common Afrikaans surnames - we've got plenty of "Van"s - but I don't know the Netherlands (especially not the Netherlands of the 1600s and 1700s) well enough to make much of them. ^^;;

I'm not sure either which part(s) they're from. They just say that the ancestors of Afrikaners are primarily Dutch and a smaller number of Frisians, English, Germans and French. So I guess they were primarily from the middle or the south of the Netherlands. The VOC was settled in Amsterdam, I guess, so there must be a lot of people that came from Holland, too.

The "van"s don't really indicate where they're from. Some people are called, for example "Van Rotterdam" or something and then you know they're from Rotterdam, but most of the time it's not clear, like "Van Dijk".

[Shiba]

Hmm, I see. That's a pity. What about "Van der Merwe"? There are lot of those here. And a whole lot of "Botha"s.

[Aleco]

Gauteng? "The meadow where the fish laid their eggs"

We had three Xhosa women come to our school back in middle school I remember them teaching us some weird clickety words! Thanks for the information, though. Are there any clear dialectal differences within South Africa, by the way?

[Shiba]

Haha Over here it means "place of gold" or something like that.

Oh, cool. Yeah, Xhosa has four different clicks, as far as I know. My brother downloaded a YouTube video about that some time ago.

You're welcome. ^^ Well, that would depend - within which language in South Africa? Within Afrikaans, yes, there certainly are. The Coloureds (they call themselves that), at least the ones who live in the Cape, have their own dialect. The Afrikaners in the Cape also have their own dialect, in which they don't like to open their mouths a whole lot (and words like "ek" go from something that sounds like "æk" to "êk", or even "ik"). The Malmesbury people (also in the Cape) have those guttural R's like the Germans. The Vrystaters have their own dialect, I can't really think of any examples, but they've got unique expressions and so on. Then there's the more Pretoria/Johannesburg kind of accent, which is most pronounced in the very localised Menlo Park dialect (it's a suburb or something of Pretoria), where people seem to have replaced most vowels with "ô", haha. x) (It's this Pretoria/Jo'burg dialect that I've got.) There are probably a whole lot more than the ones I've mentioned, but those were what I could think of.

[Aleco]

Thank you once again South Africa is interesting. I would really like to go there one day

[Shiba]

You're welcome. And thanks!

[Reinder]

Hmm, I see. That's a pity. What about "Van der Merwe"? There are lot of those here. And a whole lot of "Botha"s.

The name "Van der Merwe" comes from the name of a medieval castle near the city of Dordrecht (South Holland). The name "Botha" seems to come from Friesland and North-Germany, that's pretty nice to know that there's also something Frisian in South-Africa.

[Shiba]

Awesome, thanks for the information!

I saw a surname today, it was "Van" something "-burg". I told myself, "You should remember this, it's probably a pretty specific place name." And then, of course, I forgot it.

[qwert]

I came across with the following article a few months back, comparing the Afrikaans pronunciation to a bunch of dialects (361 actually) within the Netherlands and Belgium. http://www.let.rug.nl/heeringa/dialecto ... rasa08.pdf. Afrikaans was found to be closest to the South Holland variety of Zoetermeer.

Yes,this research only dealt with pronunciation and did not consider grammar at all, and keeping in mind that the Afrikaners came also from Germany and Belgium, this research's conclusion could still shed some light on the Boere's Dutch origins (or at least, the majority of them).

[Shiba]

Very interesting.

Afrikaners also come from France, though; we probably have quite a bit of French grammar worked into Afrikaans.

[Chekhov]

Apparently these sounds are /oə/ and /eə/ in IPA, so they're more like the English diphthongs in bear and poor than the ee and oo in Dutch. (Some people still pronounce the diphthong of poor more like /uə/, but these days it's becoming rarer. A better example might be poet.)

[Shiba]

Hmm... I may need to upload an mp3 sometime.