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I have another great example of this: Dutch versus South African. These were the same language and used the same dictionary and spelling rules as recent as 150
by roywashere 6y ago
I have another great example of this: Dutch versus South African. These were the same language and used the same dictionary and spelling rules as recent as 150 years ago. And now, while many words look similar, many words are different (and words for modern inventions are completely different in both languages).
This results in that when I met a group of south african ppl living in The Netherlands some time ago, we would speak English, because our native languages drifted so much apart.
- improbable22 6y agoI think the time of divergence in spoken language is much longer than that, maybe 300 years (and with lots of second-language speakers, which speeds it up). And starting I believe from dialects closer to Flemish. The formal written language was indeed standard Dutch, but was not widely understood. For example (IIRC) around 1900 the dutch reformed church in the Cape partly switched to English, on the grounds that at least this was a real European language, in which people might actually understand the sermon! After that Afrikaans got formalised, e.g. the first official bible translation was 1933.