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Comment by bradrn | Hacker News Reader

I say this as a native English speaker… but I speak South African English (or something similar), and I’ve heard that this expression is due to Afrikaans influence!

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That's probably because Afrikaans is Dutch, and Dutch is German.

Well, ‘is’ isn’t quite the right word… but they’re all closely related languages, yes, which is why I mentioned it.

Yep, I was being liberal with "is" there, but hopefully the point came across.

Dutch is German, and English is French.

English is French and German.

And therefore, Dutch is English :D

No, English and Dutch are distant cousins.

Haha ok- but then so is German. Dutch has Low Franconian origins, and the more you learn about it, the weirder it gets. Also, it did not have the consonant shift- e.g. water (en) vs water (nl) vs wasser (de).

That said, after centuries of relative stability, modern Dutch is absorbing English words as fast as it can. Who knows if it is still recognisable in 50 years.

I don't know, I think maybe Dutch and German are more estranged siblings. English is a weird case because the German part is very German, but then the non-German part is pretty big!

Afrikaans is Dutch yes, Dutch is not German.

Learn your languages before spreading unwise nonsense on the internet.

Not OP here. You're right, but you could be more charitable in your reading of the previous comment. While it's wrong at the micro level it's not even nonsense on the macro level. Dutch and German are at the very least very related. They share a lot of constructs and words.

There's no reason to be so disrespectful.

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