re: Random question: why did Dutch language in Africa evolve so much more than English here?

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read around 150 pages a night, which gets me to around 250 books a year. I

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Wow
I’m lucky to read 5 pages a night. And unlike you, I have a poor memory. So I’ll read an entire history book then forget 50% of it after a month.

I work, but am hopefully going to get into graduate school next fall. I mostly screw around on the internet at work, and save reading for before bed. I'm so used to the routine of reading before bed that I rarely read outside of before bed.

I'm the Director over part of a team that sits in the Netherlands. I spend about a month there spread out over the year, so I try to go out with them as much as possible. We had this discussion over a night of pub trivia, which had a lot of question where you had to answer with what an item was called in Afrikaans.

Basically what I was told was that the language evolved differently because it stayed very literal in its descriptions to make it easier for the native inhabitants tl learn. For example the word "Pool" in Afrikaan is "Swembad" or "Swim Bath".

And if you want to use the restroom in Holland, you ask for the WC (pronounced "vay say"), which stands for "water closet."

Fris is not a dialect of Nederlands, fyi. It’s a separate language that shares about 80% of the same words

I am awful w keys

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'm still trying to wrap my brain around occitan.
"Langue d'oc".

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Oi and Oc are pronunciations of the same word for yes JB Provençal and Occitan, two of the languages French is an amalgamation of. Lange literally means tongue, so they basically mean one tongue sounds like Oi when they say yes and the other sounds like Oc

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Basically what I was told was that the language evolved differently because it stayed very literal in its descriptions to make it easier for the native inhabitants tl learn.

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That's been my understanding when I was in ZA, as well. For instance, a giraffe is a kamelperd, which literally means camel horse. There's also a smidge of French in that language stew because of all the Huguenots that settled there. But I had an Afrikaner explain that he can understand Dutch OK, but the Dutch can't understand him.

Got the Irish and Scottish accent mixed up when a Scot was talking to me the other day. He was pissed. Like calling a Texan a cousin lovin redneck.

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And if you want to use the restroom in Holland, you ask for the WC (pronounced "vay say"), which stands for "water closet

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The term "water closet" (WC) is pretty common across Europe.