Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

97 страница из 115

To show how this has happened we must somewhat digress.

The language spoken by the Boer of to-day is called "the Taal," i.e. "the Language." It is not French, nor is it Dutch, nor is it even in the usual acceptation of the word a dialect of Dutch; but it is a form of speech based on that language. It is used at the present day all over South Africa by the Boers and half-castes as their only speech; it is found in its greatest purity in the Free State, Transvaal, and frontier districts, where it has been least exposed to scholastic and foreign influences during the last few years. To analyze fully this tiny but interesting variety of speech, would take us far beyond our limits. It differs from the Dutch of the Hollander, not as archaic forms of speech in Europe often differ from the literary, as the Italian of the Ligurian peasant from that of the Florentine, or the Somersetshire or Yorkshire dialects from the language of the London newspapers; these archaic European dialects not only often represent the earlier form of the language, but are often richer in varied idioms and in the power of expressing subtle and complex thoughts than are their allied literary forms. The relation of the Taal to Dutch is of a quite different kind. The Dutch of Holland is as highly developed a language, and as voluminous and capable of expressing the finest scintillations of thought as any in Europe. The vocabulary of the Taal has shrunk to a few hundred words, which have been shorn of almost all their inflections, and have been otherwise clipped. The plurals, which in Dutch are formed in various and complex ways, the Taal forms by an almost universal addition of an "e"; and the verbs, which in Dutch are as fully and expressively conjugated as in English or German, in the Taal drop all persons but the third person singular. Thus the verb "to be," instead of being conjugated as in the Dutch of Holland and in analogy with all other European languages, thus runs:—Ik is, Je is, Hij is, Ons is, Yulle is, Hulle is,—which would answer in English to: "I is," "thou is," "he is," "we is," "you is," "they is"! And not only so, but of the commonest pronouns many are altered out of all resemblance to their originals. Of nouns and other words of Dutch extraction, most are so clipped as to be scarcely recognizable. A very few words are from Malay and native sources; but so sparse is the vocabulary and so broken are its forms, that it is impossible in the Taal to express a subtle intellectual emotion, or abstract conception, or a wide generalization; and a man seeking to render a scientific, philosophic, or poetical work in the Taal, would find his task impossible. The literary artist who has tried to introduce into his work of art in any European language a picture of Boer life, knows how impossible it has been to find any organized dialect which would correspond to it.[18] In English neither the Scotch nor country dialects, nor the Irish brogue, nor the pithy inverted forms of city slang will answer. To a certain extent he will be able to preserve its form and spirit in copying the manner of a little child, as it lisps its mother tongue. But this would not preserve all its peculiarities. Its true counterpart is only to be found in the "pigeon" English of a Chinaman or, better still, in the Negro dialects of the Southern American States. In the stories of Brer-Fox and Brer-Rabbit, as told by the old Southern slave in Uncle Remus, we have one of the few literary examples of such a speech as the Taal. In both languages there is the same poverty of vocabulary, the same abbreviated condition of words, the same clipping of forms, and the same much larger intelligence in the speakers than ill-formed language gives them the power of expressing—a thing which can never happen where a people has slowly shaped its own language—and, as a result, the same tendency to suggest indirectly ideas which the speaker has not the power of directly stating, from which results the irresistible humour of both dialects. It is often complained of by persons lately from England, that when the English South African has a joke to make, or comic story to tell, he lapses into the Taal, which is not understood by the newcomer; the truth being that it is the use of the Taal which transforms an ordinary sentence into a joke, and makes the simplest story irresistibly comic. There is hardly a South African that has not at some time told a story in the Taal who, when called upon to translate it for the benefit of some stranger, has not found that the humour had evaporated and the laugh gone. Merely to attempt to express a deep passion or complex idea in this dialect is to be often superbly humorous. The story is told of two Cape students whose Edinburgh landlady gave them notice to quit because their laughter disturbed her other lodgers. On inquiry it turned out that they were, for their own diversion, engaged in translating the book of Job into the Taal! And so entirely is the Dutch of South Africa removed from the rich sonorous Dutch of Holland, both in structure and sound, that we were lately requested by a woman, whose native speech was the Taal, to come to her aid, as her newly arrived gardener was a German, whose speech she could not therefore understand. On the gardener appearing, we found he was a Hollander, recently from Amsterdam, and speaking the most excellent Dutch!