Steve and Johanna were born at an early age. Separately, of course: Johanna in Tanzania (yes, that’s right: Tanzania, then the British colony of Tanganyika); 
and Steve in South Africa. They grew up speaking different languages. Steve spoke a South African dialect that might loosely be called ‘English’; and Johanna spoke a corrupted version of Afrikaans called ‘Dutch’. Maybe this is why we both ended up at Wycliffe Bible Translators. Before then, of course, we had both become Christians—more about that in a later post.
The UK Wycliffe Centre
We met while doing our training at Wycliffe UK in the previous millenium (1982—ouch!). Steve strongly felt we should throw our outlandish languages into a common pot and see what happened (like pouring chemicals together to see how they snapped, crackled and popped); but Johanna didn’t think that was such a good idea. (Why and wherefore in a later post.)
So Steve went to Kenya and Johanna went to Bible college. Steve had asked God to send him anywhere, but please, not to a tone language.
The Rendille desert
So, of course, he ended up with fellow-South Africans Nick and Lynne Swanepoel among the Rendille people—nomadic camel-herders of the northern Kenya desert. Rendille isn’t exactly a tone language, it’s a tonal accent language; but Steve told the Lord that was splitting hairs. The Lord told Steve to deal with it. While Johanna learnt basic hairdressing, Greek, and other useful things at Bible college, Steve struggled to make sense of the ups and downs of Rendille tone. He also put together a slide show describing his early experiences of camels, goat’s meat, dust and scorching heat. We hope to add a version of it to our blog: keep an eye open for it, it’s called Welcome to the Rendille. But how did Steve and Johanna finally come to merge their linguistic and cultural backgrounds? Find out in the next exciting episode of our Potted History…
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Of course to be politically correct: Afrikaans is a corrupted version of Dutch. In the grey past dutch farmers (Boeren) emigrated to South Africa to settle. Even still today the Dutch farmers have their own dialect within the linguistic regional dialect where they live. From this Boeren-farmers-Dutch has Afrikaans language developed, independent of the development of the Dutch language in the Netherlands which was influenced by increasing influxes of french, german and english words over centuries.
But hey, as a linguist, should Steve not know that?
Or is he pulling my tongue?
All the best and God bless you all.
Willem Bijl.
Hallo Wim! Thanks for your comment. (I wondered whether I would ruffle a few Dutch feathers! Yes, this was a leg- or tongue-puller.)
But it depends where you live as to what is politically correct! In Holland it’s no doubt as you say. But don’t tell an Afrikaner that his language is a corruption of Dutch! I once had a fascinating conversation with an Afrikaans linguist who made a convincing case that Afrikaans is in fact closer to 17th century Dutch than modern French/German/English-influenced Dutch. He described how, at some or other national convention, many of the archaic Germanic ‘endings’ were artificially restored to the language to make it more ‘proper’; and of course after the Netherlands was occupied by the French during the Napoleonic wars, many French words replaced the native Dutch vocabulary.
In the same way Afrikaans has picked up many Malay words (from Malay slaves in the Cape), which make it different from Dutch. And the two languages have adopted different words from English. But my friend’s point (which may be disputed!) was that grammatically Afrikaans has undergone less change since the 17th century than Dutch.
Roll up, Dutch and Afrikaans-speaking readers of this blog, and have your say!
I did enjoy your tongue-in-cheek assertion that Dutch might be an odd version of Afrikaans and was rather amazed to see that someone should actually have (almost?) taken you seriously on that point. It reminded me a bit of “The Brave Soldier” Shveik, by a Czech author, where the protagonist Shveik asserts with a knowing look on his face that “actually, Russian is just a dialect of Czech”. Has anyone thought of describing English as Pidgin Anglo-Saxon (i.e. a pidginised mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French)?
Many blessings, Hugh
Hah! So English is worse than either Dutch or Russian, as it’s a corrupted MIXTURE of an ancient German dialect and an ancient French dialect!! That’ll please our English readers no end!
Hi Steve and Johanna, fun to read and will await the next episode. Rest of the website is very informative, thanks very much.
Hi Gail, glad you’ve enjoyed our website. Forgive the question, but… do we know you??