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The Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls (AWS) is a publication of the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns and comprises three main sections: spelling rules, a list of words, and a list of abbreviations for Afrikaans. The first edition appeared in 1917, and regular revisions have been undertaken since then.
Afrikaans: Hy het 'n huis gekoop. Dutch: Hij heeft een huis gekocht. English: He (has) bought a house. Relative clauses usually begin with the pronoun "wat", used both for personal and non-personal antecedents. For example, Afrikaans: Die man wat hier gebly het was ʼn Amerikaner. Dutch: De man die hier bleef was een Amerikaan.
The Akademie was founded in Bloemfontein in 1909, and its branch, the Spellingskommissie ("Spelling Commission"), in 1914. [ 1 ] The commission focuses mainly on the revision and publication of the Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls (AWS; "Afrikaans Word List and Spelling Rules"), a standard guide to the spelling and related writing conventions ...
Words of Afrikaans origin have entered other languages. British English has absorbed Afrikaans words primarily via British soldiers who served in the Boer Wars. Many more words have entered common usage in South African English due to the parallel nature of the English and Afrikaner cultures in South Africa. Afrikaans words have unusual ...
The phrase "ek kan nie" (shortened to kannie = cannot/can't) is personified as a lazy man. The phrase is used as a form of motivation and discipline, implying that if you can do a physical task as easy as pushing a wheelbarrow, then you are more than capable enough to do any kind of hard work. katspoegie – lit. "kat's spit". Refers to a very ...
The name of the language comes directly from the Dutch word Afrikaansch (now spelled Afrikaans) [n 3] meaning 'African'. [12] It was previously referred to as 'Cape Dutch' (Kaap-Hollands or Kaap-Nederlands), a term also used to refer to the early Cape settlers collectively, or the derogatory 'kitchen Dutch' (kombuistaal) from its use by slaves of colonial settlers "in the kitchen".
The Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (HAT) is a shorter, concise Afrikaans explanatory dictionary in a single volume, compared to the comprehensive Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (WAT), similar to the Concise Oxford Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. The project was begun in 1926 by Prof. J. J. Smith of Stellenbosch ...
In some words, such as hamer, short /a/ is in free variation with long /ɑː/ despite the fact that the spelling suggests the latter. In some words, such as laat (vb. 'let'), the pronunciation with short /a/ occurs only in colloquial language, to distinguish from homophones ( laat, adj. 'late').