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Your comment and the linked Wikipedia pages has challenged my understanding of my native language, Afrikaans. Based on the description I would classify Afrikaa
by beAbU 5y ago
Your comment and the linked Wikipedia pages has challenged my understanding of my native language, Afrikaans.
Based on the description I would classify Afrikaans as synthetic, not analytic.
Afrikaans has an origin as a pidgin Dutch spoken by slaves and other lower classes. Afrikaans speakers can communicate effortlessly with Dutch and Flemish speakers for example. Our grammar is decidedly germanic and we make use of morphemes in stead of separate words.
Held: hero
Heldjie: diminutive hero
Helde: plural
Heldin: female hero
Heldinnetjie: diminutive female hero
Heldinne: plural
Although it should be noted that explicit female versions of nouns is falling out of favour to some degree.
- seabird 5y agoAccording to what I've read (which could very well not be representative of the language as it's spoken by your community), grammatical gender (which Dutch still has) is largely dead in Afrikaans. There is no case system present in Afrikaans. Much like in English, you wouldn't modify the article of the word because that word is part of some innate class ("gender") of nouns. Die held, die heldin, die helde, etc. In German, you would have der Held (hero), die Heldin (heroine), die Helden (heroes)/die Heldinnen (heroines), and those articles would change depending on the noun's role in the sentence (ie "der Held" -> "dem Helden", if the hero is the one receiving something in a sentence). English and Afrikaans still have remnants of grammatical gender and case, but it's not really enough to be considered a prominent feature of the language.
- pjlegato 5y agoIt's a question of relative positioning along spectrum, not a binary state. Real languages are not "synthetic" or "analytic" in an absolute sense. They are "more synthetic than this other language" or "more analytic than this other language."