Talk:Afrikaans grammar

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ʕSome links to all those grammatical terms would be nice. Zyxoas (talk to me - I'll listen) 23:42, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

You are quite right, I think it would be easier to understand if the terms were hyperlinked. --payxystaxna 13:41, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Afrikaans Infinitive

All afrikaans infinitive does not look exactly like the present form, instead there is an infinitive construction:

The correct form of the present (and future) infinitive for the afrikaans verb "speel" (to play) is "om te speel".
A past infinitive can also be formed, for speel this infitive is om te gespeel het.

Notably these infinitives are remarkably like the english full infinitives to play and to have played

Note that just like English, Afrikaans has a short or bare infinitive form that does look exactly like the present form.

Examples:

  1. Ek hou van speel - I like playing (short form)
  2. Ek het vergeet om te speel - I forgot to play (full form)
  3. Om te gespeel het was 'n voorreg - To have played was an honour.

I am a native afrikaans speaker, but would still like having the input of other speakers before editing these comments into the article. --payxystaxna 14:10, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Why do they use 'om' before 'te' in the infinitive? Ozdaren 16:22, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
Our present infinitives form that way (they do not necessarily look exactly like the present form), I am not sure why. Though it seems to me now that this is almost exclusively when using the action of a verb as the object of another verb. Maybe somewhat like the Latin gerund.
We were taught at school that the all infinitives are of the form "om te ..." which is why I made this comment in the first place. The shortened form that I refer to above is a gerund while the "om te ..." construction is the infinitive. --payxystaxna (talk) 14:38, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Preterite form

About the preterite form, the page says: "The preterite has been completely replaced by the perfect. Once again, the verb wees is the only exception to this rule, which admits the preterite form was." Immediately after that, there's a list of preterite forms (sou/kon/wis etc.) That's confusing. Perhaps someones who speaks Afrikaans can improve this.

To clarify, the page states that the preterite form has been completely replaced by the perfect. This is true for all normal verbs. The only exceptions (as the page states) is the modal verbs sal, wil, kan, moet and mag (these translate as will, want to, can, have to and may / might, which are modal verbs of English as well.) and the only truly irregular Afrikaans verbs, wees and hê. Wees has a preterite form was while its present form is is. While hê has an (archaic) preterite form had, which has mostly fallen out of use and has been replaced by the perfect form het gehad.
It is important to note that Afrikaans speakers make no distinction in meaning between the preterite and perfect forms. And it is often a difficult distinction to teach young children the distinction when learning European languages. --payxystaxna (talk) 14:49, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "To school"

I seem to remember being told that, while Dutch has "naar school", Afrikaans has IPA /skweltu/ - not sure how it's written... If true, is this an influence from one of the substratum languages? Thanks. Jpaulm 14:44, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

You are probably thinking of skool toe, for example:-

Elke môre loop ek skool toe. Every morning I walk to school.

Toe of course is the Afrikaans cognate of the English to and they sound very similar, it is just that the word order is slightly different, literally 'Every morning walk I school to'.Booshank 12:57, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Does it add anything to have the comparison with Dutch in this article on Afrikaans grammar? I do not think it does and makes things a bit confusing but I'll wait to see what others think before removing it. Afrikaans does have a cognate of the Dutch naar which is na. For example: Ek kyk na die maan - I look to the moon. Or, I look at the moon. Booshank 20:05, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
Slightly different?! It is very different from the majority of European languages - hence my question: was the word order perhaps influenced by a substratum language? Jpaulm 00:10, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
Does use of the preposition 'toe' at the end of the sentence reflect its role as a separable prefix from the verb. German has a similar use eg. anrufen (to call) ich ruf ihn an (i call him). Is the verb therefore 'toeloop' which is then split into 'loop ... ... ... toe'. Just curious. Ozdaren 01:50, 3 November 2007 (UTC)