> Well, World, you have kept faith with me, Kept faith with me; Upon the whole you have proved to be Much as you said you were. Since as a child I used to lie Upon the leaze and watch the sky, Never, I own, expected I That life would all be fair.
@verbose Just a little measure to decrease the risk, since I'm a chatterbox and can say something wrong about the Glorious Leader and his Special Military Operation
@CowperKettle ah. I'm not sure whether you mean that living in the Netherlands is the measure, or that giving folks the impression you live in the Netherlands is the measure, but enquiring too deeply into that would undercut the measure, so I shall refrain. But I shall continue to imagine you and @Tsundoku occasionally crossing the street/border (same thing, I believe) for a friendly chat in Dutch.
I once knew a former woman of easy virtue of whose past life there remained only a daughter who was almost as beautiful as the mother had once been, from The Lady of the Camellias.
This is my understanding: I once knew a (former woman of easy virtue) whose past life....
@Mithical Ah good, then enjoy Bitterblue! It's a fascinating deep dive into the after-effects of a certain king's rule and the difficulty of putting a country back together after that kind of person had been in charge of everything.
One of the most interesting characters in anything I've read. Horrendous, but interesting.
@verbose No, but Afrikaans and Dutch are strongly related, so the language is fairly easy to read. As a test, I started reading both the Afrikaans and the Frisian Wikipedia articles about that language. Both articles are roughly equally easy to read for me.
@Tsundoku ah. I once had occasion to be around when a Dutch and an Afrikaans speaker attempted a conversation (their first time speaking to someone who spoke the other language). The Dutch speaker had an easier time; she later told me Afrikaans sounded like old fashioned Dutch with simplified declensions. The Afrikaans speaker said that Dutch sounded weird.
@verbose Neither Dutch nor Afrikaans have cases. Dutch has some remnants of it; I don't know about Afrikaans. And Afrikaans doesn't conjugate verbs like Dutch: the form remains the same regardless of person or number. (A bit like English, except the third person singular has no extra -s.) Dutch, by contrast has proper conjugations.
Afrikaans verbs (except for two of them) have no preterite forms. Dutch has strong verbs, weak verbs, irregular verbs ... the lot. So it's Afrikaans that sounds simplified to speakers of Dutch.
@Tsundoku ah thanks. That's probably what I'm dimly remembering, the Dutch speaker saying that Afrikaans sounded like old-fashioned but ungrammatical Dutch.
Because of the lack of conjugations and verb tenses
I once knew a former woman of easy virtue of whose past life there remained only a daughter who was almost as beautiful as the mother had once been, from The Lady of the Camellias.
This is my understanding: I once knew a (former woman of easy virtue) whose past life....
