Hi, As I'm Dutch, I recognise Piesang of South Africa (banana) as the Indonesian word for banana and as that was a colony of the Dutch at the same time (more or less) as South Africa, the word may have migrated from Indonesia to South Africa. Thanks for a nice reaction.
Yes, it did migrate. Some of the slaves were brought from Indonesia and some South Africans still have some Indonesian heritage. A few malay/indonesian words from the slaves back in the day like piesang, blatjang and piering for instance crept into the Afrikaans language.
I love your expressions😂 BTW the Afrikaans word for giraffe, kameelpard, directly translated says - camelhorse. And a hippopotamus in Afrikaans is a seekoei, which directly translated is seacow. There's a funny video of a man telling a story in Afrikaans & then it's directly translated to English & it's so funny. Direct translations from Afrikaans to English are good for a laugh! Proudly South African & love all 11 of our languages.
5:32 That's actually a joke you learn as a little kid in Germany. If someone comes up to you and says "Hi" (sounding like Hai/shark) you look shocked and ask "Wo/Where?" 😱😂
I speak four languages here in South Africa which are English, Afrikaans, Setswana and Zulu, and because our 11 official languages are so similar with each other it means to a certain degree I can speak 10 of our 11 official languages of South Africa. Also because I can also speak Afrikaans it means I can speak Dutch to a degree. So technically it means I can speak 11 languages, even if I'm not 100% fluent in all of them
As an Afrikaans speaking English South African with a Dutch father I approve of this video. Surprisingly I could understand a lot of the German quite easily. Hospital in Afrikaans is 'hospitaal' but I'm sure that was probably a typo in the last slide.
Also in Dutch is hospitaal a known word but less used these days, it's (with respect) a word used in the older Dutch languages, that's why it's common in Afrikaans because Afrikaans of course is derived from older Dutch.
Afrikaans has a lot of influences from the other African languages as well as Malay and English itself. Kameelperd is an Afrikaans original. We don't have a "hard j" sound in formal Afrikaans, all of the "g" sounds are fricative and we probably would've used it on the word "giraffe", but considering the rest of the world uses the "hard j" sound, or something similar for "giraffe", it just made more sense to use a new word. The Cape-Malay accent does make use of a "hard j" sound, but this is only applied to words starting with the letter "j". Directly translated "kameelperd" is "camel horse", and it kinda does look like a cross between a camel and a horse.
Kameelperd is one of those weird words which are based on a Greek word, but was adapted to the phonology of Afrikaans because kameel (camel) and perd (horse) both exists independently in Afrikaans, so the Greek name for the creature was adapted because it sounds similar to the end result. The lexographic history of the word alone is worth an entire lecture.
As a Belgian, where we've had Dutch , French , English and German in school , Afrikaans literally sounds like our local dialects. So many, including myself could say that we fluently speak all 5 languages easely or at least 3 of the 5 fluently , And 2 of them to a usable degree. ( for the Flemish part , Wallonie only speaks French XD )
@Spring Afrikaans is eigenlijk oud Nederlands. Ik begrijp heel goed wat jij schrijft. Alleen is de zin vaak anders geschreven. Even een vraag als jullie een giraf. Kameelperd noemen . Hoe heet dan bij jullie een kameel 🐫 groetjes uit Nederland
Piesang comes from Indonesia. The Dutch made Indonesia into a colony and the word for banana in Indonesia is Pisang. Many Dutch sailors adopted this word. And because South Africa was a halfway station the word Piesang became the Afrikaans word for banana. Sausage comes from France. The English nobilty spoke French and used this word so it became the new English word for the old English word weursht. Just like chair instead of stool or beef instead of rund.
The few malay/indonesian origin words in Afrikaans are attributed to the slaves that were brought from that part back in the day and those words were then "adopted" into the early Dutch spoken in South Africa few hundred years ago.
@@xXTheoLinuxXx .... "Amokmaker" for someone causing violent trouble. "Amok" comes from the Indonesian word for trouble/violence, while "maker" does not need any explanation i guess...
But also of the MALAY Language that was used by MALAYSIAN Slaves in the Dutch CAPE COLONY of the time... Afrikaans my Language is a brewing pot of DUTCH,FRENCH some MALAY and GERMAN.
Very nice content Michel, enjoyed and learned something. There are so many similarities between these languages. I also speak "Fries" (frisian), and when I was visiting Norway a couple of years ago, I found out there are a lot of similaties with that language as well. But I think you already knew this. Keep these kind of content coming!
About frisian and norsk having similarities: i didn't have a single understanding from frisian, but while I was learning Norwegian, I have seen alanguage comparisation video wich included frisian, and I could understand it! Has to do with Danish vikings that have been in the Netherlands, I found out. (Norway has been part of Denmark).
I was going for a swim at the beach in a South African town (Franskraal) Another swimmer was coming out and said to me what sounded like „Hi meneer“ which to me meant „Hello sir“. How friendly! Turns out he meant „Haai meneer“ so he was telling me that there was a shark.!!! My Afrikaans friends think this hilarious 😂
Hi again, Kameelperd (Giraffe) is funny. From a Dutch perspective, it seems to be a fusion of camel (Kameel in Dutch) and horse (Paard in Dutch, Perd sounds like the South Africa equivalent). Funny also as South Africa is the only country of the four (UK-Germany-Netherlands) were giraffes are native animals.
@@thomaskurschner2949 In the province Groningen in dialect they also say 'peerd' for a horse. Famous is 'Het Peerd van Ome Loeks'. So peerd is a synonim for paard.
Where kameelperd comes from? Kameel is Afrikaans for camel. Perd is Afrikaans for horse - it may not sound like the English, it does sound like German and Dutch. So, the giraffe is called a camel-horse.
Here in Germany people also know what a Trekker is, at least where I come from (Berlin). Though Trekker is more considered slang or dialect while Traktor is the "proper" word.
The original name for dog in English is Hound, which in turn is derived from the word Hond and is originally a Dutch word that was used as a loan word in the English language. 1% of all words in the English language are Dutch words.
and now im like really confused why they used hond as loan. cause im dutch and hond only has one meaning, dog. like how did they came up with a synonym for "loan"
@@peterc.1618 West Frisian (and maybe others) have dogge, which in English would be a mastiff. So basically dog and hound have switched places in English.
Sausage might have a french root 'saucisson' which means more or less the same thing. Remember that after the Norman conquest in 1066 a lot of French words were assimilated into English, before that Old English and Old Dutch were quite similar.
I am an afrikaans-speaking South African. The dutch came to Cape Town to start a 'garden' where fresh fruit and vegetables could be bought by the ships passing the Cape of Good Hope. They arrived in 1652. I have inherited an old dutch bible with a letter in the front of the bible directed at 'de staten general' and the letter was dated 16 July 1637. This bible probably found its way to South Africa with the first dutch setlers.
That's really interesting. I'm a English speaking South African who's been learning Afrikaans EAT in school for years but I still haven't mastered it 😂 What part of the country you from?
Hi Andre, baie interesant. Verlangse angetroude familie van my het n bybel wat blykbaar in kaapstad gedruk was ook in hoogs hollands (Nederlands) in watse jaar weet ek nie, word blykbaar die Statebonds Bybel genoem, boek is so te se kapoet en kan nie meer geblaai word nie. deskundiges het aanbeveel om hom net so te hou, kan nie meer gered (restoreer) word nie. In hom kom die name YHVH of YAHWEH en Yahshua Messiah voor, kan jy my dalk antwoord hoe dit in daai een voorkom. Baie dankie sal dit waardeer.
Rob Words, has a lot of great videos on how languages are related and change over time. One on German vs English show some simple “tricks” on how to figure out the meaning of German words as an English speaker
A very early English term for Giraffe is Cameleopard., which is similar to the Africaans word. Ananas for pineapple is the way the French say it too. English originally was a germanic language, but a lot of French got added after 1066, bits from other places have been absorbed too, mainly from imperial days.
English is still 100% germanic though, as the grammar wasn't changed by the loanwords. And the most central and frequent words are still germanic or scandinavian, despite all the old norman french words.
Notice 'siblings' in English, ' Geschwister' in German and 'brothers and sisters' in Dutch. We don't have a word like that in Dutch. I always wondered why that is.
In my family's language, Mennonite Low German: Een (pronounced like German Eins without the S) or Eent Twee (Pronounced like Zwei) Drei Vea (pronounced almost like "Fire" in a British accent) Fief (the "ie" is like German) Sass Säwen Acht Näajen Tien Root Bleiw Witt Jreen Jälroot Jäl Roosa Schwoat Aupel Banan (I don't know what a pineapple is called) Malkj Broot Worscht Kjarps Kjees Koffe Hunt Kaut Koo Pieet Boa Heifesch Tieja Liew Jierop Eelefaunt Beisikjel Mootasikjel Loftschepp Kjätel / Trekjta Boot Zuch And interestingly, the word for shark in Finnish is also "Hai".
@@dutchman7623 My ancestors moved across Europe before coming to Canada, but I believe most of my ancestry is originally from the Netherlands and the Hamburg area. My parents and most of my relatives can speak Mennonite Low German, and I can also understand it pretty well.
@@corinna007 In the east of the Netherlands and north in Germany they both speak a Saxon dialect, in which they can understand each other. Many similarities in words. Thanks for your reply!
@@dutchman7623 No problem! I've sent a couple of example videos of people speaking it to one of my Dutch friends, and she said it sounds very similar and that it seems like a "bridge" between Dutch and Standard German. It amuses me that when I hear or read Dutch, I can pick out words that sound the same or similar and understand them. And I think because the Mennonites left that area so long ago, our language kept a lot of words and features from older forms of German and Dutch.
Piesang came from Dutch Indonesia, which traded bananas via the Cape of South Africa to Europe by the Dutch East-Indian Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Company, VOC for short). Also in Dutch we sometimes say that "You are the piesang" and it basically means "You are screwed".
Pisang is Indonesian. It came to Afrikaans through Dutch, although we don't use it often. Sausage comes from French. Many English words are, more than half of the English words actually has their origin in French. English is mostly Germanic in base words like counts, food and animals. Dog may be different from the others, but Hound is actually the related word. Horse is different from the others, but all three other languages actually have a related word: Ros in Dutch and Ross in German, both are regional forms of "Paard/Pferd". English word "shark" had an original meaning of "scoundrel", related to Dutch "schurk" (criminal). Hai/Haai comes from Norwegian "hár" which is related to proto-Germanic *hako (hook) because of the shape of the shark's back fin. Afrikaans Kameelperd actually means camelhorse. Giraffe comes from Arabic: "zarāfa".
In Dutch we use "Pisang" to indicate that someone (or yourself) is the "victim" of something bad that happened or is about to be happening. Mostly something unharmfull but not to the person's liking😂
Dog is also Germanic but not related to the rest. Mostly all Germanic languages, western ones, have the same French (latin originated) equivelants but don't use it that often and use other synonyms.
A giraffe’s Afrikaans name comes from the way it walks and runs. When it walks, it walks like a camel (left legs together, then right legs together). But when it runs, it runs like a horse (right front leg with left back leg and visa versa). In Afrikaans a camel is a “kameel” and a horse is a “perd”, hence the name kameelperd (walks like a kameel and runs like a perd)
All of them are germanic languages but had al different influences. English had a lot French influence. And Afrikaans had influences from mostly Dutch but also English, Indonesia(former Dutch colony) and off course the local languages. Happy to understand all of them. Dutch is my mother tongue, English my second language, Germany is only 5km away so understand it very well and Afrikaans is just very similar to Dutch. Like Afrikaans a lot because it sounds a bit like archaic Dutch and a lot of words of them sound more like my local (officially) Dutch dialect.
@@thewarriorbunny pardon can also be used in Englisch and "excuse me" is nearly the same as excuseer mij" in Dutch. Love the verskoon(verschoon in Dutch) in Afrikaans.
If you are curious about where kameelperd for giraffe came to Afrikaans, I'm more than happy to inform you that is a totally different word in English, German or Dutch, because it derives from the Greek word for the animal. Take in mind that in Greek "pardalos" means "spotted" So a spotted lion becomes Leo Pard. And a spotted Camel becomes Camelo Pard ΛΕΟΠΑΡΔΑΛΙΣ & ΚΑΜΗΛΟΠΑΡΔΑΛΙΣ accordingly.
@Rob Friedrich horse ? No no. Animals with the horse word, are the horse itself (hippos), horse of the river, (hippopotamus), and caterpillar horse, (hippocampus).
This aspect of Afrikaans actually shows a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in languages. Like how they in English changed certain words to more Latin/Greek rooted words, because it was seen as more cultured. Which is probably why so many of the mineral, chemical, scientific words in Afrikaans has a more Latin/Greek feel. Interesting enough, many of the food and cooking terms in Afrikaans has French roots. While other words like 'kombuis' shows the colonial/shipping history since it's actually rooted in the dutch word for galley rather than kitchen.
I'm an English South African, I had both Afrikaans and German as school subjects. I used to live on the border of the Netherlands and Germany and now I live in Berlin. I speak German fluently, understand dutch 100%, but somehow I lost my ability to speak Afrikaans😅 I feel so ashamed when people ask me to speak Afrikaans. My brain automatically switches between Dutch and German. To me, it feels like there are some rules missing in Afrikaans and I want to complete the sentence with the German or Dutch sentence structure.
Two random things: 1) The simple basic English words often have a German/Frisian shared origin (like Dutch and German and Scandinavian languages). However, when it comes to the more 'expensive' words, English has a lot of French influence (and perhaps Latin as well). As in the clip it were the 'simple' words, you see a lot of similarities. English will likely diverge more from Dutch and German and might be suddenly a bit closer to French when you go to the more fancy words. 2) In The Netherlands we have a second language called (West)Frisian that is still spoken. This language is the closest to Old-English of all the living languages. Meaning that an English person from the Middle Ages is more likely to be able to talk with a farmer from the north of The Netherlands, then with people from England.
Fascinating how I could understand most stuff in the other three languages while only actually speaking english. Some pronounciation is almost same or very similar. Some words are also close to what they would be in my own language - despite it being finnic altogether xD this made me want to take up language classes again though, for sure!
If you replace dog in English with hound then it's basically hond in the other languages. Afrikaans and English both simplified difficult rules that continental European languages had so in the examples given i would have swoped German and Afrikaans as the latter was very influenced by English while German is the more different one.
Fun fact, Middle English used to have the harsh 'ch' sound like German and Dutch, we used to say night as nichte (nikh-te) and 'the day after tomorrow' used to be overmorrow, which in modern German and Dutch is übermorgen and overmorgen
In English, a giraffe was originally called 'Cameleopard' because explorers described them as a cross between a camel (long neck) & Leopard (patchy/spotted hide)!!
@@dan74695 Yeah... That might explain some of it. But I was more or less speaking about the melody and rhythm of HOW the words are pronounced. Not the words themselves.
Nice one, thanks! @05:37 The moral here being: If you want to survive; don't stick with only English...😉 Well, knowing that English is an Indo-European language, closely related to languages such as Frisian, (Lower) German and Dutch, which are counted among the West Germanic languages. It originated in England during the time of the Anglo-Saxons. (Angel-Saksen) Angel -> Eng-land.🤓 Conclusion here would be that the English went pretty far astray (not uncommon).😉😁
The words for black in German, Dutch, and Afrikaans have the same root as the English word "swarthy," which means dark (typically referring to skin color or complexion).
A lot of people I have met get confused between Afrikaans, Dutch and German. I am a South African and I do talk multiple languages but my first is Afrikaans. My mother is a travel agent and I was once on a trip with a bunch of Italian people and there was a boy about my age and tried to flirt with me and literally said , " Teach me that beautiful language you speak with your mother you beautiful GERMAN girl or wait you Dutch right ? Wait Afrikaans? Is that even a language? How do you spell it? Why does it have a k? Why does your ks and gs and all your other letters sound so weird. " 😭
I read ones that Malaysian people immigrated to South Africa therefor South Africa got few Malaysian/Indonesia words in there language like biesang. Western germanic languages are English, Dutch, Flemish eastern germanic languages is in Germany and Nordic germanic languages are the Scandinavion languages. I heard from german people that when we dutch people talk in dutch it is for them like we are talking English sometimes.
Btw some words in English come from Latin and old Norman French for example hospital in English if we use strictly Germanic origin words it be sickhouse and if im right all those would directly translate to sickhouse if we don’t take into account hospital
Thats why I speak, understand and feel all the four languages, my brains started to work after being in the Dutch airforce for 2 years in germany in 1986 till 1989. English was already on a high level because of school and TV we watch in english, my german I learned as a militair and later I lived for 10 years in Germany. And South Africaans and Vlaams (Belgium) is easy stuff for a Dutch person...Frisian is more difficult....
I just found out something interesting. The Afrikaans name for the giraffe "Kameelperd" is derived via 17th century Dutch from the Latin name camelopardalis.
Very similar, but there are VAST differences. Afrikaans is a very unique language. You will notice this most when you listen to common talk. Dutch is far more lyrical than Afrikaans. Afrikaans sounds like a marriage between Scots, Malay, Arabic, Niger-Congo Bantu and Japanese (the last merely just for the intonation alone). The language has may influences of Khoi-San and French as well.
I speak afrikaans so I was very shocked when not too long ago I saw an Indonesian pisang dessert recipe, obviously very similar to the word piesang in afrikaans. I'm guessing we pinched it at some point, which makes sense since indonesia is a big player in the banana producing game.
Not pinched exactly - piesang is one of the Afrikaans words that goes back to the origins of the language in the early settlement at the Cape. Some of the slaves brought to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company originated in Indonesia, and they were instrumental in the evolution of Afrikaans as a language distinct from Dutch
I know the languages are so similar since i speak Dutch, English and German. However in this video they are kinda selective in which words they choose in a sentence. For instance, the last sentence: "I work in the hospital". And for Dutch they choose "Ik werk in het ziekenhuis". However in Dutch we also have the word "Hospitaal", that is a synonym for "Ziekenhuis". So they also could have used "Ik werk in het hospitaal" which looks way more similar with "I work in the hospital" and "Ek werk by die hospital". And yes here we use ziekenhuis more often than hospitaal, but the word hospitaal is still in use, and common enough. Also Indonesian word for banana is Pisang. So it is likely that the Afrikaanse word Piesang is derived from that since both countries were colonies of the Dutch for several hundreds of years.
and Kameelperd is most likely a combination of the dutch Kameel and Paard and fused them together. idk why those 2 animals and trekker could have also been used in dutch spreek and praat can be used in dutch
And similarly there is more variation in Dutch, the Dutch speaker seems to favour a standard Dutch with an accent from the Randstad. But there is also a more Flemish version of standard Dutch and heaps of dialects.
😂😂 kameelperd is realy funny word for giraffe! Love it. Kameel have to be Camel (Kamel in swedish) and perd have to be horse (pferd in german) = camelhorse! A very good name for a giraffe in fact! 👏
I speak four languages, ranging from English to high German. Because they are so closely related it is very easy to mix them up. Worse, there are many false phonetics, words that sound exactly the same but have a different mening. The most infamous being the Dutch Zee and meer (sea and lake) that are the exact opposite in German
This reminds, a long time ago I asked "was sagen Sie?"... as I was translating it from Dutch. Apparently when trying to translate 'polite Dutch' to German, one might fail to translate the polite part. Also my parents also made a mistake with the German language (again, a very very long time ago). The hiking trail read "5 Stunden", and my parent thought it would probably mean something like '5 kilometers" or "5 miles". Anyway, they arrived at the hotel slightly late.
From what I recall English is what happened when a Germanic language got taken over by a romance (French) after the norman conquest of 1066, Flemish is if the Germanic form of English went more Germanic instead of becoming a hybrid of Germanic/romance language.
its even more simmilair than you think. for example: in the video in English its "my favorite color is blue", and in dutch its "mijn lievelingskleur is blauw". But if you want to translate it more literally, its "Mijn Favorite kleur is blauw" which is even more similar.
It's interesting. I can see with the dutch the similarities with German and yet the pronounciation is softer. And yet often the Dutch overlaps with the Afrikaans. The Dutch again is the softer of the two. Both German and Afrikaans seem to be rougher languages you almost get the impression that both are spoken by tough hardened people. Dutch is definitely a softer language and then there is English. I have no idea where to place it be a use it is spoken so widely across the world.
5:08 That's right. The word 'beer' is indeed a false friend between English and most notably Dutch and Afrikaans. As for the English word 'beer', here are the translations: (English) beer; (German) Bier; (Dutch) bier; (Afrikaans) bier. In the three other languages, the 'ie' combination is pronounced as a slightly shorter 'ee' than what is usual in English. 6:49 Sometimes the word 'trekker' from Afrikaans is also used in Dutch (I believe for a certain type of tractor only), but it doesn't seem to be the other way around with 'tractor'. 8:21 It's interesting that it seems impossible to literally translate the English word 'siblings' to Dutch or Afrikaans (as a Dutch guyI doubt whether 'Geschwister' is correct in German, because I thought it would only refer to sisters and not brothers, thinking that 'Brüder' or 'Gebrüder' would be the word for that). 'Brothers and sisters' is the literal translation in Dutch and Afrikaans. There is not one word for it. 10:13 In a more old-fashioned kind of Dutch, and possibly in the Flemish variation of Dutch, the word 'hospitaal' was/is used. The sound of the 'aa' is longer than what you hear in the example for Afrikaans, which is common in Dutch words with doubled vowels.
One of the main reasons why English differs so much from the other languages is that English has been influenced by romance languages most (about 40-50% of modern English derives from French or Spanish).
Dutch has also been influenced by french partially, thats where we got the eau from in bureau(desk) for example but i think that was mainly during the part where the Netherlands was part of France(Napoleonic times)
@@flopjul3022 French used to be the language of high culture in all of Europe. Educated and/or rich people spoke and wrote in French, sometimes even to the exclusion of their own language. French cultural dominance predated Napoleon and lasted until the early part of the 20th century
@@moonw5814 yea although it is overstated. In the 17h century Latin was stil dominant in the treaty of westphalia, England earlier because of lovely viking-normandy Frech. 18th century French was dominant but from 19th century not anymore when it came to science at least it was English, French and German. By the 1900s German solily. In the east German was always way more a Lingua Franca in Russia, Balkans, Poland, Scandinavy, Ottomans/turky, Greece. Even Iran ans Japan also. In fact during the 1600s peter the great preferred German, English and Dutch. (especially Dutch) over French. And in victorian court German was spoken. Basicly al European nations had once a German dynasty on the throne. Wo most often also spoken German. Being catholic or either protestant doasn't matter. Pre-West Francia France also spoken Germanic as the high class language accomplished with Latin. French was then just growing from Latin. During the Merovinviangs (Merovechen) and Corolingian dynasties.
@@moonw5814 Although Dutch during the edo period in Japan as only western Germanic langauge. German later during the 1880s onwards to 1945 and then American English.
I'm South African and I speak Afrikaans, English and a little bit of Zulu. However, I do like to hear and see how other languages is pronounced. I think Afrikaans formed with a lot of European influence due to what happened in history with regards to people who came here. Also, I heard the other day that in Indonesia they say Oma and Opa for grandparents, as well as in Germany, and here we say Ouma and Oupa. I also heard in Spanish the word Gratis means for free and in SA we use it in Afrikaans also as Gratis and it means for free. Pronunciation is just different. Also, in the german language they use the word lekke and we say lekker which means it's nice, or that something is good. Also, a long time ago, a lot of South Africans immigrated to Argentina....I think our trading posts from the coastline as well as the road Cape to Cairo brought all the languages and cultures and thus make South Africa a very awesome and diverse country with great places and great food!
In german, there is the word "werken" instead of Arbeit. Which isn't used in this way any longer, but a "Werk" means Factory or crafted piece. As well as its possible to use the word "Hound" instead of "dog" in english. So there are even more similarities if we try to find them.
Hi. Your pronounciation of the texts, no matter Dutch, Germain or South African is almost perfect 👍 . I know because I lived in South Africa for 3 years, and as a teenager in Canada, before that I went to highschool in Nederland where I also learned German(Duits) which I loved because of the beautiful literature, (Duits! that is sometimes a bit confusing with the word Dutch) and on top I have a German sister in law and we have a weekly skype session in 3 languages. Just to keep up 😊 I am sure you could learn all 3 as well. 😉 By the way: the harsh G is not spoken like that where I live. Noord Brabant! It is a soft G. There is a lot of difference in spoken Dutch, depending on the region. Dialect! That would be much harder to learn. That is why all over in the Netherlands we learn to speak ABN. algemeen beschaafd Nederlands. You could translate that as 'civilisised!' 😂 Compliment aan jou. Je doet het PRIMA. OOK MET JE MOOIE MUZIEKVIDEO'S. ❤
If you wanna see more similarities between german and dutch, they have to use words from low german or frisian rather then high german. Cause there is a very big difference between the dialects from the north and the south in germany.
My Wife's Grandmother sounded more like the lady from the Netherlands. However she was from a very rural part of Germany about two miles from the Dutch border. As an Englishman that can speak German, I could understand her better than many Germans could, once I got used to it?
She was probably from the Northern part of Germany. The Northern part of the Netherlands and the bordering part of Germany used to be the East Frisian region. Frisian is one of the oldest germanic languages that still existsts, and has a lot in common with Old English (much more than Dutch). This would explain why you understood it better than most Germans. Even today the dialect of Northern Netherlands is very similar to the bordering part of Northern Germany. Much more than standard Dutch and German are.
04:05 "Sausage" is a French loanword, which I think it comes from Latin. 05:36 "Shark" is another latinism word in English since it comes from Latin "escualus". 07:25 I mean, English is a Germanic language, that's why there are lots of similarities.
Old dutch and old english are extremely similar, there’s this video where a guy tries to use old dutch to buy a cow from a farmer who speaks old english (or the other way around) its really interesting
many times when English words are the odd ones out, we got that word from Norman French or a specific word became a general word. I think DOG used to be a specific kind of dog and HOUND was the general term, but they switched - Hound is now a specific type of dog.
Norwegian here, speaking basic German. Fun fact: I understood a bit more Afrikaans than Dutch here.🙂But it would not take that long to learn both languages to a decent level, even with some really demanding pronunciation issues awaiting. Also, the grammar is less complex than in German. Main problem will be that English is so widely spoken in the Netherlands - and is an official language and a sort of lingua franca in SA.
@HighlyCombustibleReacts reminder that England was evaded by the Normans in 1066 and they brought over the French langue - this why Modern English has some strange spelling for that words would similar in Dutch, German and Afrikaans words
Kameelpaard is literally the latin name of aGiraffa camelopardalis. "Camelopard" /kəˈmɛləˌpɑːrd/ is an archaic English name for the giraffe; it derives from the Ancient Greek καμηλοπάρδαλις (kamēlopárdalis), from κάμηλος (kámēlos), "camel", and πάρδαλις (párdalis), "leopard", referring to its camel-like shape and leopard-like colouration
English is different because of the Norman Conquest in 1066. Since then, English is only about 55% Germanic and 45% Latin (via Old French). Even in some of the Germanic words, French influenced the spelling and pronunciation. Most other Germanic languages today only have a tiny bit of influence from other languages for instance New High German is only about 5% Latin-based. If you put Old English aside these other languages it is a lot closer. The rest of it comes down to the languages evolving differently. Yellow in Old English is ġeolu, which is pronounced YAYOH-loo (with the eo (ay-oh) being pronounced as one syllable) so it sounds very similar to yellow but looks a lot closer to the other Germanic languages. Old English had 4 different ways to pronounce g, and modern consonant y came from one of them (y was its own vowel in OE pronounced like German ü). Also, in OE, dog was hund just like in NHG, and bird was fugol (compare NHG vogel) but hund became hound later in English and fugol became fowl (both more specific words) while the more specific words in OE, docga (hound) and bridd (baby bird) became the modern general terms. Also, in OE do you speak English and I speak English is "Spricst þu Ænglisc" and "Ic sprece Ænglisc", almost identical to New High German.
Another problem, however, is that when it comes to the percentages of foreign words in German, Latin and Greek are usually grouped together and French is treated as a separate group. Actually, one should merge the Romance languages with Latin and take Greek as a separate group.
Indeed.. Germanic Languages are easy to pick up..Being Dutch, i learned German as a kid, watching German Children's programmes, like "Die Sendung mit der Maus" (The program with the Mouse), it taught me enough to just walk into a shop and buy something i wanted, when i was 12..
Hi, As I'm Dutch, I recognise Piesang of South Africa (banana) as the Indonesian word for banana and as that was a colony of the Dutch at the same time (more or less) as South Africa, the word may have migrated from Indonesia to South Africa. Thanks for a nice reaction.
Yes, it did migrate. Some of the slaves were brought from Indonesia and some South Africans still have some Indonesian heritage. A few malay/indonesian words from the slaves back in the day like piesang, blatjang and piering for instance crept into the Afrikaans language.
Precisely what I thought. I wrote another comment about it before I read yours just now
Pisang Ambon was the "fashionable" alcoholic drink for a while.
Yeah, Pisang is indeed Malayan, the language of Indonesia or (as they used to be called) the Dutch East Indies.
5:16 what is the Dutch word for the English word Beer?
I love your expressions😂 BTW the Afrikaans word for giraffe, kameelpard, directly translated says - camelhorse. And a hippopotamus in Afrikaans is a seekoei, which directly translated is seacow. There's a funny video of a man telling a story in Afrikaans & then it's directly translated to English & it's so funny. Direct translations from Afrikaans to English are good for a laugh! Proudly South African & love all 11 of our languages.
We are about to have 12! Sign language!🎉🎉 Die skole gaan begin kinders leer hoe om hand taal te "praat".
In german language we call manatees "Seekuh" (Sea cow), while hippopotamus is called "Flusspferd" (River horse) or "Nilpferd"(Nile horse) in german.
@@Rat84641 Wanner ons bestuur, leer ons sommer gou hand taal😅
Sea Cow is pretty funny. in Dutch it's Nijlpaard (which is a Nile Horse)
Luiperd which means leopard in English…when translated directly to Afrikaans is lazy horse 🤣
5:32 That's actually a joke you learn as a little kid in Germany. If someone comes up to you and says "Hi" (sounding like Hai/shark) you look shocked and ask "Wo/Where?" 😱😂
I speak four languages here in South Africa which are English, Afrikaans, Setswana and Zulu, and because our 11 official languages are so similar with each other it means to a certain degree I can speak 10 of our 11 official languages of South Africa.
Also because I can also speak Afrikaans it means I can speak Dutch to a degree.
So technically it means I can speak 11 languages, even if I'm not 100% fluent in all of them
That’s amazing!
12! You will understand Flemish to. The north off Belgium
@@StrawberryHills211 thats just dutch
@@axolotl-guy9801 ‘just’ allée da klink toch nie aardig, wel? 😉
What is the one language of 11, you are not understanding? Khoisan?
As an Afrikaans speaking English South African with a Dutch father I approve of this video. Surprisingly I could understand a lot of the German quite easily. Hospital in Afrikaans is 'hospitaal' but I'm sure that was probably a typo in the last slide.
Ok, but it's more kind, than "sick ones' house"
Also in Dutch is hospitaal a known word but less used these days, it's (with respect) a word used in the older Dutch languages, that's why it's common in Afrikaans because Afrikaans of course is derived from older Dutch.
thanks for showing my request, i think Highly about you ;) also thanks for showing my Margrathen and canadian vets request. bless you
10:20 Afrikaans is more polite, than Dutch "I work in the sick ones' house"
Hoe is het meer formeel. Zijn patiënten niet ziek dan?
Afrikaans has a lot of influences from the other African languages as well as Malay and English itself. Kameelperd is an Afrikaans original. We don't have a "hard j" sound in formal Afrikaans, all of the "g" sounds are fricative and we probably would've used it on the word "giraffe", but considering the rest of the world uses the "hard j" sound, or something similar for "giraffe", it just made more sense to use a new word. The Cape-Malay accent does make use of a "hard j" sound, but this is only applied to words starting with the letter "j". Directly translated "kameelperd" is "camel horse", and it kinda does look like a cross between a camel and a horse.
Kameelperd is one of those weird words which are based on a Greek word, but was adapted to the phonology of Afrikaans because kameel (camel) and perd (horse) both exists independently in Afrikaans, so the Greek name for the creature was adapted because it sounds similar to the end result. The lexographic history of the word alone is worth an entire lecture.
The "perd" is actually from "luiperd" (leopard). So it isn't a "camel horse", it's a "camel leopard".
As a Belgian, where we've had Dutch , French , English and German in school , Afrikaans literally sounds like our local dialects. So many, including myself could say that we fluently speak all 5 languages easely or at least 3 of the 5 fluently , And 2 of them to a usable degree. ( for the Flemish part , Wallonie only speaks French XD )
Dat komt omdat Zuid Afrika van Nederland is geweest. Daarom dat je het goed kan verstaan
As a dutch from North-Brabant i Found Afrikaans also a bit like our dialect.
@@013d3nn1s Ook van N.B. Je weet toch wel dat Zuid-Afrika van Nederland is geweest he
@Spring Afrikaans is eigenlijk oud Nederlands. Ik begrijp heel goed wat jij schrijft. Alleen is de zin vaak anders geschreven. Even een vraag als jullie een giraf. Kameelperd noemen . Hoe heet dan bij jullie een kameel 🐫 groetjes uit Nederland
@@hellen__1Die fokken kameelperd is van Afrika. Ons sal hom benoem soos ons wil. Dis ons kameelperd. Totsiens
The joke about the shark... Ive actually seen stupid kids go "Haai! Haai!" At the beach... trying to scare people while having possible denial 😂
Piesang comes from Indonesia. The Dutch made Indonesia into a colony and the word for banana in Indonesia is Pisang. Many Dutch sailors adopted this word. And because South Africa was a halfway station the word Piesang became the Afrikaans word for banana.
Sausage comes from France. The English nobilty spoke French and used this word so it became the new English word for the old English word weursht. Just like chair instead of stool or beef instead of rund.
The few malay/indonesian origin words in Afrikaans are attributed to the slaves that were brought from that part back in the day and those words were then "adopted" into the early Dutch spoken in South Africa few hundred years ago.
@@yehodrago2873 You're absolutely right. My respect for your knowledge. 👍
There are more words like these. Baklei (fight or argue) in Afrikaans comes from Indonesia too (Bakalai), In Dutch it is bakkaleien.
@@xXTheoLinuxXx .... "Amokmaker" for someone causing violent trouble. "Amok" comes from the Indonesian word for trouble/violence, while "maker" does not need any explanation i guess...
But also of the MALAY Language that was used by MALAYSIAN Slaves in the Dutch CAPE COLONY of the time... Afrikaans my Language is a brewing pot of DUTCH,FRENCH some MALAY and GERMAN.
Very nice content Michel, enjoyed and learned something. There are so many similarities between these languages. I also speak "Fries" (frisian), and when I was visiting Norway a couple of years ago, I found out there are a lot of similaties with that language as well. But I think you already knew this.
Keep these kind of content coming!
About frisian and norsk having similarities: i didn't have a single understanding from frisian, but while I was learning Norwegian, I have seen alanguage comparisation video wich included frisian, and I could understand it! Has to do with Danish vikings that have been in the Netherlands, I found out. (Norway has been part of Denmark).
@@Wypermess Yes, these languages are definitely connected. I had the same experience with understanding words in Norway.
@@catlover-9426 Its because they have been in the Netherlands also. The vikings. I believe mainly in the north.
@@hellen__1t
think you are wright about this.
learning a language is like most other things: focus on what you CAN do instead of what you find difficult, the rest will follow.
I was going for a swim at the beach in a South African town (Franskraal) Another swimmer was coming out and said to me what sounded like „Hi meneer“ which to me meant „Hello sir“. How friendly! Turns out he meant „Haai meneer“ so he was telling me that there was a shark.!!! My Afrikaans friends think this hilarious 😂
Hi again, Kameelperd (Giraffe) is funny. From a Dutch perspective, it seems to be a fusion of camel (Kameel in Dutch) and horse (Paard in Dutch, Perd sounds like the South Africa equivalent). Funny also as South Africa is the only country of the four (UK-Germany-Netherlands) were giraffes are native animals.
Here in Cologne we say Peerd for a horse, i think is old speaking, here in Germany we call this speaking "platt "
@@thomaskurschner2949 In the province Groningen in dialect they also say 'peerd' for a horse. Famous is 'Het Peerd van Ome Loeks'. So peerd is a synonim for paard.
Actually, Kameelperd might come from the Latin for giraffe, camelopardalis
In Dutch we also can use the word ros for horse, it sounds old, but still present in roskam and rosmolen.
@@dutchman7623 interesting, roskam is also in Afrikaans (has a double meaning)
Where kameelperd comes from? Kameel is Afrikaans for camel. Perd is Afrikaans for horse - it may not sound like the English, it does sound like German and Dutch. So, the giraffe is called a camel-horse.
In Dutch we use the words tractor and trekker. It's mixed up. Also depends where you live I think.
You are right Linda, where I live in the Netherlands we say Trekker.
Here in Germany people also know what a Trekker is, at least where I come from (Berlin). Though Trekker is more considered slang or dialect while Traktor is the "proper" word.
The original name for dog in English is Hound, which in turn is derived from the word Hond and is originally a Dutch word that was used as a loan word in the English language. 1% of all words in the English language are Dutch words.
and now im like really confused why they used hond as loan. cause im dutch and hond only has one meaning, dog. like how did they came up with a synonym for "loan"
And the etymology of the word 'dog' is unknown.
@@nijlpaardw9085 loan woord, leenwoord. een woord geleend uit een andere taal.niet een woord dat met lenen te maken heeft.
@@peterc.1618 West Frisian (and maybe others) have dogge, which in English would be a mastiff. So basically dog and hound have switched places in English.
@@alfresco8442 But we still don't know the etymology.
Sausage might have a french root 'saucisson' which means more or less the same thing. Remember that after the Norman conquest in 1066 a lot of French words were assimilated into English, before that Old English and Old Dutch were quite similar.
You would be correct.
Dutch have the word saucijs(je), which means sausage as well.
@@dutchman7623 French or Spanish influence perhaps?
@@johnp8131 Yep! We use vla for custard, like the Spanish flan.
All luxury in English are French words in origin. Beef, mutton, veal, venison,.. poultry,.. Pork and chicken were apparently more common.
I am an afrikaans-speaking South African. The dutch came to Cape Town to start a 'garden' where fresh fruit and vegetables could be bought by the ships passing the Cape of Good Hope. They arrived in 1652. I have inherited an old dutch bible with a letter in the front of the bible directed at 'de staten general' and the letter was dated 16 July 1637. This bible probably found its way to South Africa with the first dutch setlers.
That's really interesting. I'm a English speaking South African who's been learning Afrikaans EAT in school for years but I still haven't mastered it 😂
What part of the country you from?
@@GenericUsername1388 Cape Town
Hi Andre, baie interesant. Verlangse angetroude familie van my het n bybel wat blykbaar in kaapstad gedruk was ook in hoogs hollands (Nederlands) in watse jaar weet ek nie, word blykbaar die Statebonds Bybel genoem, boek is so te se kapoet en kan nie meer geblaai word nie. deskundiges het aanbeveel om hom net so te hou, kan nie meer gered (restoreer) word nie. In hom kom die name YHVH of YAHWEH en Yahshua Messiah voor, kan jy my dalk antwoord hoe dit in daai een voorkom. Baie dankie sal dit waardeer.
Rob Words, has a lot of great videos on how languages are related and change over time. One on German vs English show some simple “tricks” on how to figure out the meaning of German words as an English speaker
A very early English term for Giraffe is Cameleopard., which is similar to the Africaans word.
Ananas for pineapple is the way the French say it too.
English originally was a germanic language, but a lot of French got added after 1066, bits from other places have been absorbed too, mainly from imperial days.
what the south african said was camel-horse
@@dawatcherz isnt that the same as cameleo(camel) pard(paard/horse)
In Greek giraffe translates to "kamilopárdali" καμηλοπάρδαλη.
Nice video!
A giraffe has certain characteristics that is shared between a camel(kameel) and horses(perd).
English is still 100% germanic though, as the grammar wasn't changed by the loanwords. And the most central and frequent words are still germanic or scandinavian, despite all the old norman french words.
Notice 'siblings' in English, ' Geschwister' in German and 'brothers and sisters' in Dutch. We don't have a word like that in Dutch. I always wondered why that is.
I don't know why that is, but we also don't have a word for 'cousins', just 'nephews and nieces'.
ik heb daar wel vaker aan gedacht, maar wat zou nou een mooi woord zijn, probeer maar s iets te verzinnen
In scandinavia we have "søsken (no/den) and söskon (swe)" Kinda weird you don't have it. :-)
In Dutch we ad ‘volle’ to neef en nicht when we want to point out cousins
@@nijlpaardw9085 Nestgenoten.
In my family's language, Mennonite Low German:
Een (pronounced like German Eins without the S) or Eent
Twee (Pronounced like Zwei)
Drei
Vea (pronounced almost like "Fire" in a British accent)
Fief (the "ie" is like German)
Sass
Säwen
Acht
Näajen
Tien
Root
Bleiw
Witt
Jreen
Jälroot
Jäl
Roosa
Schwoat
Aupel
Banan
(I don't know what a pineapple is called)
Malkj
Broot
Worscht
Kjarps
Kjees
Koffe
Hunt
Kaut
Koo
Pieet
Boa
Heifesch
Tieja
Liew
Jierop
Eelefaunt
Beisikjel
Mootasikjel
Loftschepp
Kjätel / Trekjta
Boot
Zuch
And interestingly, the word for shark in Finnish is also "Hai".
From which region or country is your family?
@@dutchman7623 My ancestors moved across Europe before coming to Canada, but I believe most of my ancestry is originally from the Netherlands and the Hamburg area. My parents and most of my relatives can speak Mennonite Low German, and I can also understand it pretty well.
@@corinna007 In the east of the Netherlands and north in Germany they both speak a Saxon dialect, in which they can understand each other. Many similarities in words.
Thanks for your reply!
@@dutchman7623 No problem! I've sent a couple of example videos of people speaking it to one of my Dutch friends, and she said it sounds very similar and that it seems like a "bridge" between Dutch and Standard German. It amuses me that when I hear or read Dutch, I can pick out words that sound the same or similar and understand them. And I think because the Mennonites left that area so long ago, our language kept a lot of words and features from older forms of German and Dutch.
Piesang came from Dutch Indonesia, which traded bananas via the Cape of South Africa to Europe by the Dutch East-Indian Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Company, VOC for short). Also in Dutch we sometimes say that "You are the piesang" and it basically means "You are screwed".
Pisang is Indonesian. It came to Afrikaans through Dutch, although we don't use it often.
Sausage comes from French. Many English words are, more than half of the English words actually has their origin in French. English is mostly Germanic in base words like counts, food and animals.
Dog may be different from the others, but Hound is actually the related word.
Horse is different from the others, but all three other languages actually have a related word: Ros in Dutch and Ross in German, both are regional forms of "Paard/Pferd".
English word "shark" had an original meaning of "scoundrel", related to Dutch "schurk" (criminal). Hai/Haai comes from Norwegian "hár" which is related to proto-Germanic *hako (hook) because of the shape of the shark's back fin.
Afrikaans Kameelperd actually means camelhorse. Giraffe comes from Arabic: "zarāfa".
In Dutch we use "Pisang" to indicate that someone (or yourself) is the "victim" of something bad that happened or is about to be happening. Mostly something unharmfull but not to the person's liking😂
Dog is also Germanic but not related to the rest. Mostly all Germanic languages, western ones, have the same French (latin originated) equivelants but don't use it that often and use other synonyms.
A giraffe’s Afrikaans name comes from the way it walks and runs. When it walks, it walks like a camel (left legs together, then right legs together). But when it runs, it runs like a horse (right front leg with left back leg and visa versa). In Afrikaans a camel is a “kameel” and a horse is a “perd”, hence the name kameelperd (walks like a kameel and runs like a perd)
Feite
Here's one sentence for you that is spelled exactly the same and means the same too in English as in Afrikaans: "My hand is in warm water"
All of them are germanic languages but had al different influences. English had a lot French influence. And Afrikaans had influences from mostly Dutch but also English, Indonesia(former Dutch colony) and off course the local languages.
Happy to understand all of them. Dutch is my mother tongue, English my second language, Germany is only 5km away so understand it very well and Afrikaans is just very similar to Dutch. Like Afrikaans a lot because it sounds a bit like archaic Dutch and a lot of words of them sound more like my local (officially) Dutch dialect.
Excuse me in English
Pardon in Dutch
Verskoon my in Afrikaans
My Dutch family giggled when we asked for cleaning 😂
@@thewarriorbunny pardon can also be used in Englisch and "excuse me" is nearly the same as excuseer mij" in Dutch. Love the verskoon(verschoon in Dutch) in Afrikaans.
@@thewarriorbunny it is also an old Dutch saying but we dont use it anymore basicly
They misspelled hospital in Afrikaans. The correct spelling is "hospitaal"
If you are curious about where kameelperd for giraffe came to Afrikaans, I'm more than happy to inform you that is a totally different word in English, German or Dutch, because it derives from the Greek word for the animal.
Take in mind that in Greek "pardalos" means "spotted"
So a spotted lion becomes Leo Pard.
And a spotted Camel becomes Camelo Pard
ΛΕΟΠΑΡΔΑΛΙΣ & ΚΑΜΗΛΟΠΑΡΔΑΛΙΣ accordingly.
Ok, not a camel horse...
@Rob Friedrich horse ? No no. Animals with the horse word, are the horse itself (hippos), horse of the river, (hippopotamus), and caterpillar horse, (hippocampus).
This aspect of Afrikaans actually shows a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in languages. Like how they in English changed certain words to more Latin/Greek rooted words, because it was seen as more cultured. Which is probably why so many of the mineral, chemical, scientific words in Afrikaans has a more Latin/Greek feel. Interesting enough, many of the food and cooking terms in Afrikaans has French roots. While other words like 'kombuis' shows the colonial/shipping history since it's actually rooted in the dutch word for galley rather than kitchen.
I'm an English South African, I had both Afrikaans and German as school subjects. I used to live on the border of the Netherlands and Germany and now I live in Berlin. I speak German fluently, understand dutch 100%, but somehow I lost my ability to speak Afrikaans😅 I feel so ashamed when people ask me to speak Afrikaans. My brain automatically switches between Dutch and German. To me, it feels like there are some rules missing in Afrikaans and I want to complete the sentence with the German or Dutch sentence structure.
Its logical because Afrikaans is a daughter language.
Two random things:
1) The simple basic English words often have a German/Frisian shared origin (like Dutch and German and Scandinavian languages). However, when it comes to the more 'expensive' words, English has a lot of French influence (and perhaps Latin as well). As in the clip it were the 'simple' words, you see a lot of similarities. English will likely diverge more from Dutch and German and might be suddenly a bit closer to French when you go to the more fancy words.
2) In The Netherlands we have a second language called (West)Frisian that is still spoken. This language is the closest to Old-English of all the living languages. Meaning that an English person from the Middle Ages is more likely to be able to talk with a farmer from the north of The Netherlands, then with people from England.
A more traditional Dutch word for sausage is “saucijs” and we still know today the saucijzenbroodje (sausage filled pastry) so there’s a link😅
About dog the English is alone, about cat the German is alone.
Kameelperd. Lol. That's too funny. A camel horse. Well... why not, lol
Camelopardalis is the Greek/Latin name for Giraffe. It means camel-leopard (combination of long neck and spots).
Here's some more funny Afrikaans animals:
luiperd - lazy horse (leopard)
jagluiperd - hunting lazy horse (cheetah)
verkleurmannetjie - colour changing man (chameleon)
vlakvark - shallow pig (warthog)
ystervark - iron pig (porcupine)
seekoei - sea cow (hippopotamus)
Fascinating how I could understand most stuff in the other three languages while only actually speaking english. Some pronounciation is almost same or very similar. Some words are also close to what they would be in my own language - despite it being finnic altogether xD this made me want to take up language classes again though, for sure!
Just awesome to see these closely related languages together like that. And you’re doing a great job with Dutch man!
Glad you think so!
@@HighlyCombustibleReacts it’s true 😂
If you replace dog in English with hound then it's basically hond in the other languages. Afrikaans and English both simplified difficult rules that continental European languages had so in the examples given i would have swoped German and Afrikaans as the latter was very influenced by English while German is the more different one.
Fun fact, Middle English used to have the harsh 'ch' sound like German and Dutch, we used to say night as nichte (nikh-te) and 'the day after tomorrow' used to be overmorrow, which in modern German and Dutch is übermorgen and overmorgen
In English, a giraffe was originally called 'Cameleopard' because explorers described them as a cross between a camel (long neck) & Leopard (patchy/spotted hide)!!
I am Swedish and I must say that our language is sometimes very similar to Dutch and sometimes very similar to Afrikaans, in the way of accents.
Welkom Sweedse broer! - Välkommen min svenske bror!
A lot of the similarities are because of Low Saxon(AKA Low German), the Scandinavian languages have a ton of Low Saxon loanwords.
@@dan74695 Yeah... That might explain some of it. But I was more or less speaking about the melody and rhythm of HOW the words are pronounced. Not the words themselves.
@@henryJBonaparte Oh, I missed that part. Lol
The "Doeiii" says it all 😂
I speak three of the language and understand dutch if speaking slowly, but your facial expressions are the best😂😂
I'm a linguist from South Africa, l can speak around 15 languages
Thanks for the laughs😂 and please, stay awesome!
Nice one, thanks!
@05:37 The moral here being: If you want to survive; don't stick with only English...😉
Well, knowing that English is an Indo-European language, closely related to languages such as Frisian, (Lower) German and Dutch, which are counted among the West Germanic languages. It originated in England during the time of the Anglo-Saxons. (Angel-Saksen) Angel -> Eng-land.🤓
Conclusion here would be that the English went pretty far astray (not uncommon).😉😁
The words for black in German, Dutch, and Afrikaans have the same root as the English word "swarthy," which means dark (typically referring to skin color or complexion).
A lot of people I have met get confused between Afrikaans, Dutch and German. I am a South African and I do talk multiple languages but my first is Afrikaans. My mother is a travel agent and I was once on a trip with a bunch of Italian people and there was a boy about my age and tried to flirt with me and literally said , " Teach me that beautiful language you speak with your mother you beautiful GERMAN girl or wait you Dutch right ? Wait Afrikaans? Is that even a language? How do you spell it? Why does it have a k? Why does your ks and gs and all your other letters sound so weird. " 😭
I'm South African. I speak Afrikaans and am learning German. This was so cool to see. 😁
Awesome vid! Cheers from South Africa.
Hahahah, Haai, I'm gonna die! LOL Hi-la-rish!
I read ones that Malaysian people immigrated to South Africa therefor South Africa got few Malaysian/Indonesia words in there language like biesang. Western germanic languages are English, Dutch, Flemish eastern germanic languages is in Germany and Nordic germanic languages are the Scandinavion languages. I heard from german people that when we dutch people talk in dutch it is for them like we are talking English sometimes.
Btw some words in English come from Latin and old Norman French for example hospital in English if we use strictly Germanic origin words it be sickhouse and if im right all those would directly translate to sickhouse if we don’t take into account hospital
Thats why I speak, understand and feel all the four languages, my brains started to work after being in the Dutch airforce for 2 years in germany in 1986 till 1989. English was already on a high level because of school and TV we watch in english, my german I learned as a militair and later I lived for 10 years in Germany. And South Africaans and Vlaams (Belgium) is easy stuff for a Dutch person...Frisian is more difficult....
100 % true xd i can understand it but because i know german not because i speak dutch hahahaha
@@daniellecool89 So many words are almost the same so you already know 25% by listening better :):)
Ironic because Frisian is technically the closest with English
@@Jollofmuncher2000 That's correct, but only the old English parts.
I just found out something interesting. The Afrikaans name for the giraffe "Kameelperd" is derived via 17th century Dutch from the Latin name camelopardalis.
Very similar, but there are VAST differences. Afrikaans is a very unique language. You will notice this most when you listen to common talk. Dutch is far more lyrical than Afrikaans.
Afrikaans sounds like a marriage between Scots, Malay, Arabic, Niger-Congo Bantu and Japanese (the last merely just for the intonation alone). The language has may influences of Khoi-San and French as well.
I speak afrikaans so I was very shocked when not too long ago I saw an Indonesian pisang dessert recipe, obviously very similar to the word piesang in afrikaans. I'm guessing we pinched it at some point, which makes sense since indonesia is a big player in the banana producing game.
Not pinched exactly - piesang is one of the Afrikaans words that goes back to the origins of the language in the early settlement at the Cape. Some of the slaves brought to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company originated in Indonesia, and they were instrumental in the evolution of Afrikaans as a language distinct from Dutch
I'm Afrikaans and we don't even know where kameelperd comes from. Essentially we call a giraffe a camel horse??
I know the languages are so similar since i speak Dutch, English and German. However in this video they are kinda selective in which words they choose in a sentence. For instance, the last sentence: "I work in the hospital". And for Dutch they choose "Ik werk in het ziekenhuis". However in Dutch we also have the word "Hospitaal", that is a synonym for "Ziekenhuis". So they also could have used "Ik werk in het hospitaal" which looks way more similar with "I work in the hospital" and "Ek werk by die hospital".
And yes here we use ziekenhuis more often than hospitaal, but the word hospitaal is still in use, and common enough.
Also Indonesian word for banana is Pisang. So it is likely that the Afrikaanse word Piesang is derived from that since both countries were colonies of the Dutch for several hundreds of years.
and Kameelperd is most likely a combination of the dutch Kameel and Paard and fused them together. idk why those 2 animals
and trekker could have also been used in dutch
spreek and praat can be used in dutch
And similarly there is more variation in Dutch, the Dutch speaker seems to favour a standard Dutch with an accent from the Randstad. But there is also a more Flemish version of standard Dutch and heaps of dialects.
@@flopjul3022 We also have Trecker as a synonym for Traktor in German.
It’s “het hospitaal” not “de hospitaal”. That is to say: it’s grammatical gender is neuter, rather than feminine or masculine.
@@ikbent262 Sorry je hebt gelijk, was in de war met het meervoud, dan wordt het de. Doet echter verder geen afbreuk aan mijn verhaal.
😂😂 kameelperd is realy funny word for giraffe! Love it. Kameel have to be Camel (Kamel in swedish) and perd have to be horse (pferd in german) = camelhorse! A very good name for a giraffe in fact! 👏
I speak four languages, ranging from English to high German.
Because they are so closely related it is very easy to mix them up.
Worse, there are many false phonetics, words that sound exactly the same but have a different mening. The most infamous being the Dutch Zee and meer (sea and lake) that are the exact opposite in German
This reminds, a long time ago I asked "was sagen Sie?"... as I was translating it from Dutch. Apparently when trying to translate 'polite Dutch' to German, one might fail to translate the polite part.
Also my parents also made a mistake with the German language (again, a very very long time ago). The hiking trail read "5 Stunden", and my parent thought it would probably mean something like '5 kilometers" or "5 miles". Anyway, they arrived at the hotel slightly late.
If you compare South African with the Frisian language, there are more similarities in terms of grammar and pronunciation then dutch language itself.
From what I recall English is what happened when a Germanic language got taken over by a romance (French) after the norman conquest of 1066, Flemish is if the Germanic form of English went more Germanic instead of becoming a hybrid of Germanic/romance language.
its even more simmilair than you think. for example: in the video in English its "my favorite color is blue", and in dutch its "mijn lievelingskleur is blauw". But if you want to translate it more literally, its "Mijn Favorite kleur is blauw" which is even more similar.
It's interesting. I can see with the dutch the similarities with German and yet the pronounciation is softer. And yet often the Dutch overlaps with the Afrikaans. The Dutch again is the softer of the two.
Both German and Afrikaans seem to be rougher languages you almost get the impression that both are spoken by tough hardened people.
Dutch is definitely a softer language and then there is English. I have no idea where to place it be a use it is spoken so widely across the world.
5:08 That's right. The word 'beer' is indeed a false friend between English and most notably Dutch and Afrikaans. As for the English word 'beer', here are the translations:
(English) beer; (German) Bier; (Dutch) bier; (Afrikaans) bier.
In the three other languages, the 'ie' combination is pronounced as a slightly shorter 'ee' than what is usual in English.
6:49 Sometimes the word 'trekker' from Afrikaans is also used in Dutch (I believe for a certain type of tractor only), but it doesn't seem to be the other way around with 'tractor'.
8:21 It's interesting that it seems impossible to literally translate the English word 'siblings' to Dutch or Afrikaans (as a Dutch guyI doubt whether 'Geschwister' is correct in German, because I thought it would only refer to sisters and not brothers, thinking that 'Brüder' or 'Gebrüder' would be the word for that). 'Brothers and sisters' is the literal translation in Dutch and Afrikaans. There is not one word for it.
10:13 In a more old-fashioned kind of Dutch, and possibly in the Flemish variation of Dutch, the word 'hospitaal' was/is used. The sound of the 'aa' is longer than what you hear in the example for Afrikaans, which is common in Dutch words with doubled vowels.
If I'm in a Dutch or German speaker say "Hi!" at a beach, I'll swiftly run out of the water! 🤣😂🤣 Your remark was hilarious! You funny man, you!
One of the main reasons why English differs so much from the other languages is that English has been influenced by romance languages most (about 40-50% of modern English derives from French or Spanish).
That explains why vocabulary can be different. But the big pronunciation difference is due to the Great Vowel Shift
Dutch has also been influenced by french partially, thats where we got the eau from in bureau(desk) for example but i think that was mainly during the part where the Netherlands was part of France(Napoleonic times)
@@flopjul3022 French used to be the language of high culture in all of Europe. Educated and/or rich people spoke and wrote in French, sometimes even to the exclusion of their own language. French cultural dominance predated Napoleon and lasted until the early part of the 20th century
@@moonw5814 yea although it is overstated. In the 17h century Latin was stil dominant in the treaty of westphalia, England earlier because of lovely viking-normandy Frech. 18th century French was dominant but from 19th century not anymore when it came to science at least it was English, French and German. By the 1900s German solily.
In the east German was always way more a Lingua Franca in Russia, Balkans, Poland, Scandinavy, Ottomans/turky, Greece. Even Iran ans Japan also. In fact during the 1600s peter the great preferred German, English and Dutch. (especially Dutch) over French.
And in victorian court German was spoken. Basicly al European nations had once a German dynasty on the throne. Wo most often also spoken German. Being catholic or either protestant doasn't matter.
Pre-West Francia France also spoken Germanic as the high class language accomplished with Latin. French was then just growing from Latin. During the Merovinviangs (Merovechen) and Corolingian dynasties.
@@moonw5814 Although Dutch during the edo period in Japan as only western Germanic langauge. German later during the 1880s onwards to 1945 and then American English.
It's interesting, how the similarities change.
😂 You are the laugh I needed
Grappig om deze talen te vergelijken en verassend veel overeenkomsten ❤
Snaaks om die tale te vergelyk en verrassend hoeveel dit ooreen stem (Afrikaans).
Lekker nè??
@@pauldbeer die antwoord
I'm South African and I speak Afrikaans, English and a little bit of Zulu. However, I do like to hear and see how other languages is pronounced. I think Afrikaans formed with a lot of European influence due to what happened in history with regards to people who came here. Also, I heard the other day that in Indonesia they say Oma and Opa for grandparents, as well as in Germany, and here we say Ouma and Oupa. I also heard in Spanish the word Gratis means for free and in SA we use it in Afrikaans also as Gratis and it means for free. Pronunciation is just different. Also, in the german language they use the word lekke and we say lekker which means it's nice, or that something is good. Also, a long time ago, a lot of South Africans immigrated to Argentina....I think our trading posts from the coastline as well as the road Cape to Cairo brought all the languages and cultures and thus make South Africa a very awesome and diverse country with great places and great food!
In german, there is the word "werken" instead of Arbeit. Which isn't used in this way any longer, but a "Werk" means Factory or crafted piece.
As well as its possible to use the word "Hound" instead of "dog" in english.
So there are even more similarities if we try to find them.
Hi. Your pronounciation of the texts, no matter Dutch, Germain or South African is almost perfect 👍 . I know because I lived in South Africa for 3 years, and as a teenager in Canada, before that I went to highschool in Nederland where I also learned German(Duits) which I loved because of the beautiful literature, (Duits! that is sometimes a bit confusing with the word Dutch) and on top I have a German sister in law and we have a weekly skype session in 3 languages. Just to keep up 😊 I am sure you could learn all 3 as well. 😉 By the way: the harsh G is not spoken like that where I live. Noord Brabant! It is a soft G. There is a lot of difference in spoken Dutch, depending on the region. Dialect! That would be much harder to learn. That is why all over in the Netherlands we learn to speak ABN. algemeen beschaafd Nederlands. You could translate that as 'civilisised!' 😂
Compliment aan jou. Je doet het PRIMA. OOK MET JE MOOIE MUZIEKVIDEO'S. ❤
Thanks!
Haha, you.."doei".. that was funny 😂
I love the auto translator, you were called "Highly Compostable"...
If you wanna see more similarities between german and dutch, they have to use words from low german or frisian rather then high german. Cause there is a very big difference between the dialects from the north and the south in germany.
watt, was.. appel, apfel... ik, ich... auf, off, op..
"Kameelperd" is not so odd - up until the 17th Century, the English word for a Giraffe was "Camelopard".
My Wife's Grandmother sounded more like the lady from the Netherlands. However she was from a very rural part of Germany about two miles from the Dutch border. As an Englishman that can speak German, I could understand her better than many Germans could, once I got used to it?
She was probably from the Northern part of Germany. The Northern part of the Netherlands and the bordering part of Germany used to be the East Frisian region. Frisian is one of the oldest germanic languages that still existsts, and has a lot in common with Old English (much more than Dutch). This would explain why you understood it better than most Germans. Even today the dialect of Northern Netherlands is very similar to the bordering part of Northern Germany. Much more than standard Dutch and German are.
@@carolinavanderlande4904 "Two miles from the Dutch border", near Goch but the border has moved since she was born around 1908.
@@carolinavanderlande4904 look for the video in which annenglismanntries to communicate with a Frisian farmer with his old English .
Clearly a giraffe is a camel horse (kameelperd) 😂 just don’t ask what a slipper is.
I think this video is very accurate, but it would be more accurate if all 4 was the same gender.
04:05 "Sausage" is a French loanword, which I think it comes from Latin.
05:36 "Shark" is another latinism word in English since it comes from Latin "escualus".
07:25 I mean, English is a Germanic language, that's why there are lots of similarities.
Old dutch and old english are extremely similar, there’s this video where a guy tries to use old dutch to buy a cow from a farmer who speaks old english (or the other way around) its really interesting
many times when English words are the odd ones out, we got that word from Norman French or a specific word became a general word. I think DOG used to be a specific kind of dog and HOUND was the general term, but they switched - Hound is now a specific type of dog.
I like the camel horse the most...
Norwegian here, speaking basic German. Fun fact: I understood a bit more Afrikaans than Dutch here.🙂But it would not take that long to learn both languages to a decent level, even with some really demanding pronunciation issues awaiting. Also, the grammar is less complex than in German. Main problem will be that English is so widely spoken in the Netherlands - and is an official language and a sort of lingua franca in SA.
6:50 Trekker is also a correct way of saying "tractor" in Dutch :)
Afrikaans is definitief die mooiste taal daar. Lekker man, lekker
Haha when you are in de sea and see a shark and say hi hi xD
Very interessting. Thanks. Danke. Tack. Greetings from Gothenburg Sweden..
@HighlyCombustibleReacts reminder that England was evaded by the Normans in 1066 and they brought over the French langue - this why Modern English has some strange spelling for that words would similar in Dutch, German and Afrikaans words
They didn't they brought old Frankish language
Kameelpaard is literally the latin name of aGiraffa camelopardalis. "Camelopard" /kəˈmɛləˌpɑːrd/ is an archaic English name for the giraffe; it derives from the Ancient Greek καμηλοπάρδαλις (kamēlopárdalis), from κάμηλος (kámēlos), "camel", and πάρδαλις (párdalis), "leopard", referring to its camel-like shape and leopard-like colouration
Kameelpard in stead of giraffe is hilarious. I think people struggled between a horse and a camel when seeing one for the first time 😅
🤣 "really messed some things up english wise though"
English is different because of the Norman Conquest in 1066. Since then, English is only about 55% Germanic and 45% Latin (via Old French). Even in some of the Germanic words, French influenced the spelling and pronunciation. Most other Germanic languages today only have a tiny bit of influence from other languages for instance New High German is only about 5% Latin-based. If you put Old English aside these other languages it is a lot closer. The rest of it comes down to the languages evolving differently. Yellow in Old English is ġeolu, which is pronounced YAYOH-loo (with the eo (ay-oh) being pronounced as one syllable) so it sounds very similar to yellow but looks a lot closer to the other Germanic languages. Old English had 4 different ways to pronounce g, and modern consonant y came from one of them (y was its own vowel in OE pronounced like German ü). Also, in OE, dog was hund just like in NHG, and bird was fugol (compare NHG vogel) but hund became hound later in English and fugol became fowl (both more specific words) while the more specific words in OE, docga (hound) and bridd (baby bird) became the modern general terms. Also, in OE do you speak English and I speak English is "Spricst þu Ænglisc" and "Ic sprece Ænglisc", almost identical to New High German.
Another problem, however, is that when it comes to the percentages of foreign words in German, Latin and Greek are usually grouped together and French is treated as a separate group. Actually, one should merge the Romance languages with Latin and take Greek as a separate group.
Dutch is VERY Latin and French influenced
Indeed.. Germanic Languages are easy to pick up..Being Dutch, i learned German as a kid, watching German Children's programmes, like "Die Sendung mit der Maus" (The program with the Mouse), it taught me enough to just walk into a shop and buy something i wanted, when i was 12..
The English word 'Coffee' comes from the Dutch 'Koffie' and we derived it from an Arabic word :)
I used to laugh so hard at kameelperd when I was little, coz it sorta translates to camel horse🤣🤣
If you go back before 1066 English is a lot more related to German and Frisian Dutch. But their was a lot of Viking influence too prior to 1066.
"Hai, hai...what?" 😂🦈