Germanic Languages

"Everyone knows that the DA has failed to stand up for Afrikaans language and cultural rights despite their guarantee in the Constitution."

"For Afrikaans as a language of instruction, this is a major setback. The language's ability to subsequently recover at tertiary level is most limited if aggressive efforts are not made from Afrikaans ranks to keep it alive as a language of instruction. Being pro-Afrikaans does not mean being anti-English. For that we have empathy. This is about the official recognition of a language and everything that happens concerning it. This is about the violation of a basic human right, namely the maintenance of a language."

"The fact the Supreme Court of Appeal delivered this ruling is of great interest – it is the highest court that has yet ruled in favour of Afrikaans education on tertiary level. The cost order against Unisa further confirms the moral high ground of students who demand the right to education in their native language. ... The ruling emphasises that Afrikaans also has a place on government-supported campuses."

"... the DA is already preparing for a historic and unprecedented political campaign to demand that Afrikaans be equated with English at SU."

"Inclusivity means that you involve all the speakers of all the varieties on an equal footing. No variety, including the standard variety, is considered more important than the others. Afrikaans is the sum of the language's varieties. We need to be able to greet each other with a mirrag, hoesit, saloet and aweh. ... Broad alliances – in the spirit of the multilingualism advocate dr. Neville Alexander – is required to oppose the hegemony of English and create space for the indigenous languages, Afrikaans included."

"... the new language policy [at Stellenbosch University] must explicitly commit to increasing the Afrikaans offer to ensure full access for all deserving students who wish to study in Afrikaans ..."

"... one finds that that those who are calling for the exclusive use of Afrikaans in certain schools are actually inviting antipathy [which takes the] form of annual political football that politicians use to their advantage, which is a shame. Afrikaans is not an exclusive language for racist Afrikaners. In fact, the majority of its speakers, by dint of history, are not “Afrikaners”, ..."

"A custom exists among our entire nation, where the inland peoples acquire the Dutch language, that they pronounce it in a very crooked and incomprehensible way, and cause us to imitate them therein, so that our Dutch children also acquire this practice, and the basis is laid for a broken language which eventually will be impossible to exterminate. Even less shall we be able to introduce the Dutch language among the Hottentot peoples, while they lack no competence in pronouncing the words correctly, without error, if you endeavor to dictate carefully to them, to which we should invest somewhat greater care."

"The language of the rural people is as little pure Dutch as the language of German farmers is pure German. The men have a fulsome speech and the women folk have assumed ways of speaking which at times are truly ridiculous."

"Translated from German: Die Sprache der Landleute ist so wenig reine Holländische Mundart als die teutschen Bauern reines Teutsch sprechen. Die Mannspersonen nehmen das Maul dabei sehr voll, und das Frauenvolk hat Redensarten angenommen, die zuweilen recht lächerlich sind. Zum Exempel. Man frägt etwan, ob sie keine Bibel haben, so erfolgt die Antwort: "Onz heeft" geen Bijbel ... Wenn man sie aber aldann frägt: Wie viel Unzen gehen auf ein Pfund? so werden die schamroth."

"He had lost his mother tongue almost completely and acquired the mutilated Dutch of the colonists."

"[I am acquainted with] that kind of bastard Dutch which was spoken in this country by the farmers and slaves, as well as among the Hottentots and various other heathen races, and which is not entirely absent from the speech of even the most cultured among Christians and the upper classes of people."

"The main purpose of the following collection, as one can immediately infer from the title of our work, was to eradicate from the Dutch spoken in this Colony, if it can be referred to by that name, words and expressions which are either entirely strange, or mutilated, or at least to indicate in which way this may be done."

"Translated from Dutch: Het hoofddoel van de volgende verzameling, gelijk men al dadelijk uit den titel van ons werk kan afleiden, was om het Nederduitsch, voor zoo ver de taal, die in deze Kolonie gesproken wordt, dien naam dragen mag, van deels geheel vreemde, deels verminkte woorden en spreekwijzen te zuiveren, of althans den weg daartoe aan te wijzen."

"You can trust me that the plat Hollands is read more among us farmers than that which Changuion wants to teach us in his booklets."

"Translated from Cape Dutch: Jij kan ver mij gloo dat die plat Hollans meer gelees wor onder ons boere as die wat Sankion ver ons wil leer in zijn boekies."

"The language of the Cape! … As if the miserable, bastard jargon, which is the vernacular of this country, is worthy of the name of language at all. … The poverty of expression in this jargon is such, that we defy any man to express thought in it above the merest common-place … There can be no literature with such a language, for poor as it is, it is hardly a written one … Let, then, your language and your nationality go, and believe us, you need not fear for your religion."

"You neither speak Dutch, that is the pure old Holland vernacular, much less would you soil your lips with the patois of the Hottentots about us. This I am sure is no offence, if I say you express your thoughts in a way which is not recognised in your pulpits, is not read in your books of law, does not figure in your scientific folios, and far less is it recognised as a language of an enlightened people, for it does not provide a descent vocabulary for the lowest of the low, nor for the highest of the lofty … It is one which is doing you and your children incalculable harm. It cramps your thoughts. It impedes your energies. It brings the blush to every modest women's cheeks, and makes the educated recoil with disgust too often. It corrupts the morals of your children, and befouls their innocent expressions ..."

"People tell you that Afrikaans isn't a language, because it is composed of Dutch, French, Hottentot, etc. However, the manner in which the English language is patched together is wisely hidden."

"True Afrikaners, we call on you to acknowledge with us that the Afrikaans language is the mother tongue that our Dear Lord gave us; and to make a stand with us through thick and thin for our language; and not to rest before our language is generally acknowledged as the national language of our country."

"An attempt is being made by a number of jokers near Cape Town to reduce the "plat Hollands" of the street and the kitchen to a written language and perpetuate it. They are carrying their joke well. They have a newspaper, have published a history of the colony, an almanack, and to crown the joke — a grammar. ... The promoters of the Patriot (accent the last syllable) movement are laughed at and ridiculed but they stick to their joke."

"Poor in the number of its words, weak in its inflections, wanting in accuracy of meaning and incapable in expressing ideas connected with the higher spheres of thought, it will have to undergo great modification before it will be able to produce a literature worthy of the name."

"[They] who … see no possibility of maintaining, or, rather, of restoring among the mass of the old Colonists the language of Holland, would keep out English by trying to make the lingo and slang of the lowest Hottentots the language of these people – even South Africa."

"The protection of our mother tongue must be the most important consideration of such a Bond, for language and nation are one, and those who do not see this as objective, had better not become members of our bond"

"[Although] phonetically Teutonic, it is psychologically essentially a Hottentot idiom. ... It can hardly be expected that the descendants of the Malayo-Polynesian slaves and Hottentot servants, who originally spoke an agglutinative tongue, will have any improving influence on an inflecting language."

"For intellectual training Africander Dutch offers no scope, for it has no literature and a very poor vocabulary. For internal intercourse and as a trade-medium English is superior to it; and for foreign trade it stands nowhere."

"Afrikaans ... elegant; so simple, serious, and earnest."

"The general does not use pure Afrikaans in his speeches, nor a Dutch that can easily be confused with the language of a Dutchman, but a kind of Afrikaans with Dutch inflections that he inserts haphazardly without any particular plan, so that every now and then, by pure chance, he gets one of them in the right place."

"For how long shall we entertain two thoughts? If Dutch is our language, why do we not speak it? If Afrikaans is our language, why do we not write it?"

"The Provincial Council accepted my motion that enables Afrikaans as a permissible medium up to the fourth standard."

"Be loyal unto death to your traditions, to your religion, to your language and to your people."

"Translated from Afrikaans/Dutch: Wees getrou tot den dood aan uwe tradities, aan uw Godsdie[nst,] aan uw taal, aan uw volk."

"If Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom went to ruin it would be an irrevoc­able catastrophe for South Africa. And it must not happen under any circumstances, for who has up to now preserved Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom? Not these people who hold symposia and talk big. The National Party brought Afrikaans and Afrikanerdom into being. ... Afrikaans is spoken in circles in which it was never spoken before. Today there is respect for Afrikaans from people who never had respect for it before. We should not complain that Afrikaans is going to ruin [due to language policy]. We should take pride and rejoice that Afrikaans is progressing with rapid strides in South Africa!"

"...a bridge between the great, luminous West and magical Africa … Our task lies in the current and future implementation of this gleaming vehicle ..."

"Were it not that Afrikaans literature glorifies white supremacy, and were it not for the unutterable evil this literature breathes, one would simply dismiss it as inane, a crushing bore."

"Will Afrikaans survive the Afrikaner empire?"

"The recent strikes by schools against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction is a sign of demonstration against schools' systematised to producing 'good industrial boys' for the powers that be... We therefore resolve to totally reject the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, to fully support the students who took the stand in the rejection of this dialect [and] also to condemn the racially separated education system."

"The government is prepared to be as accommodating as possible as far as the use of Afrikaans at African schools is concerned. ... In the white areas of South Africa [however, including Soweto], where the government erects the buildings, grants the subsidies and pays the teachers, it is our right to decide on language policy. The same applies to schools in areas where there is no compulsory education. Why are pupils sent to schools if [the government's] language policy does not suit them?"

"Unfortunately Afrikaans acquired certain historic connotations that resulted in its rejection by the black man, and these are political connotations."

"Сердцеведением и мудрым познаньем жизни отзовется слово британца; легким щеголем блеснет и разлетится недолговечное слово француза; затейливо придумает свое, не всякому доступное, умно-худощавое слово немец; но нет слова, которое было бы так замашисто, бойко так вырвалось бы из-под самого сердца, так бы кипело и животрепетало, как метко сказанное русское слово."

"During the last century it was lamentable for those who had to witness it, to notice how in these circles I have just mentioned the word 'Germanize' was frivolously played with, though the practice was often well intended. I well remember how in the days of my youth this very term used to give rise to notions which were false to an incredible degree. Even in Pan-German circles one heard the opinion expressed that the Austrian Germans might very well succeed in Germanizing the Austrian Slavs, if only the Government would be ready to co-operate. Those people did not understand that a policy of Germanization can be carried out only as regards human beings. What they mostly meant by Germanization was a process of forcing other people to speak the German language. But it is almost inconceivable how such a mistake could be made as to think that a Nigger or a Chinaman will become a German because he has learned the German language and is willing to speak German for the future, and even to cast his vote for a German political party. Our bourgeois nationalists could never clearly see that such a process of Germanization is in reality de-Germanization; for even if all the outstanding and visible differences between the various peoples could be bridged over and finally wiped out by the use of a common language, that would produce a process of bastardization which in this case would not signify Germanization but the annihilation of the German element. In the course of history it has happened only too often that a conquering race succeeded by external force in compelling the people whom they subjected to speak the tongue of the conqueror and that after a thousand years their language was spoken by another people and that thus the conqueror finally turned out to be the conquered."

"Not only in Austria, however, but also in the Reich, these so-called national circles were, and still are, under the influence of similar erroneous ideas. Unfortunately, a policy towards Poland, whereby the East was to be Germanized, was demanded by many and was based on the same false reasoning. Here again it was believed that the Polish people could be Germanized by being compelled to use the German language. The result would have been fatal. A people of foreign race would have had to use the German language to express modes of thought that were foreign to the German, thus compromising by its own inferiority the dignity and nobility of our nation."

"I am a German nationalist. This means that I proclaim my nationality. My whole thought and action belongs to it. I am a socialist. I see no class and no social estate before me, but that community of the Folk, made up of people who are linked by blood, united by a language, and subject to a same general fate. I love this Folk and hate only its majority of the moment, because I view the latter to be just as little representative of the greatness of my Folk as it is of its happiness."

"The people from Prague and other Czechs should be whipped who speak half Czech and half German (...) And who could enumerate how the Czech language has already been corrupted, so that the true Czech hears they speak, but he does not understand them. And from that arises envy, anger, conflict, strife and Czech humiliation."

"Most commonly, Holocaust survivors respond with habitual panic when exposed to triggers that in some way symbolize the Holocaust. Such Holocaust associated triggers may include any or all of the following: crowded trains, train stations, medical exams, a knock at the door, uniforms, extermination (of insects), yellow color, selections, gas, shower, barbed wire, discarding food (especially bread), fences, cruelty, barking dogs, any major disaster or discrimination, separations, the smell of burned flesh, closed spaces, an oven, standing in line, the freezing cold, music by Wagner, the German language and German products in general. Any of these stimuli may create a violent emotional response in the survivor who at that moment is thrown back to a life-threatening situation during the Holocaust. In addition, happy occasions such as weddings, Jewish holidays and family celebrations may also evoke sudden grief reactions, as they remind survivors of their immense loss and all the people who are absent because they were so brutally killed. As a consequence, there is frequently a contradictory effort both to remember and to forget, both to approach and to avoid the traumatic event in a compulsively repeated fashion. Like a broken record that is spinning around and around, intrusive experienced images and painful memories keep coming back while at the same time there is a conscious effort to avoid them and not to think about them."

"For my own part I have never been able to understand how he [Hitler] was capable, with his unmelodious and raucous voice, with his crude, often un-Germanically constructed sentences, and with a conspicuous rhetoric entirely at odds with the character of the German language, of winning over the masses with his speeches, of holding their attention and subjugating them for such appalling lengths of time."

"For many Germans, self-determination was both persecution and promise. About ten million speakers of the German language, former subjects of the Habsburg monarchy, remained beyond Germany’s borders. Some three million such people inhabited the northwestern rim of Czechoslovakia, right at the border of Czechoslovakia and Germany. There were more Germans in Czechoslovakia than there were Slovaks. Almost the entire population of Austria, resting between Czechoslovakia and Germany, were German speakers. Austria was nevertheless required by the Treaty of St. Germain to exist as a separate state, although much of its population would have preferred accession to Germany. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party established in 1920, was an Austrian and an advocate of an Anschluss: a unification of Austria and Germany. Such goals of national unity, dramatic as they were, actually concealed the full measure of Hitler’s ambitions."

"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."

"Some German words are so long that they have a perspective. Observe these examples:"

"This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight, and broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright colored flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room, separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the manure-pile. That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring that sort of mastery of the art and spirit of the language which enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars."