Bøger om Afrikaans

This book reflects on South African literature from the perspective of 2020. It emerges from Duncan Brown's experiences of three decades of working in this field of writing and scholarship.

In an end-of-the-century survey of philosophers in Canada and the United States, Wittgenstein¿s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was ranked the fourth most important work of philosophy in the twentieth century, and his Philosophical Investigations was ranked first. Wittgenstein was perhaps nowhere more influential than in the Vienna Circle, under whom Broch pursued his university studies in the late 1920s. The philosophers and scientists of the Vienna Circle were world-renowned in their fields, and saw in Wittgenstein¿s Tractatus a promising way to end the metaphysical and ethical speculation that had preoccupied philosophers to no avail for millennia, and which they believed had prevented philosophy from progressing commensurate to the sciences. New and powerful mathematical logic seemed to offer the means through which language could be made more precise, and philosophical confusions avoided and dissolved. But Broch was unconvinced, and argued that the novel--in addition to logical argumentation--has a unique contribution to make in the construction of one's ethical web of beliefs. This work examines Broch's philosophy and two of his novels in a Wittgensteinian context.

General review of Ukrainian literature translations into English allows us to note certain tendencies from the very first glance; they are different from translation process of any other national literature, which is first of all explained by historical and political factors. In their turn, these factors defined the nature of translations strictly by geographic principle, i.e. English-language translations performed on the European continent and beyond. Still, we can objectively state that the latter dominate over the former. As Maxim Tarnawsky rightly points out, the history of translations of Ukrainian literature into English is rather short and uneven With the exception of publishing Ukrainian classical authors, in particular Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Lesya Ukrainka and several other writers, Ukrainian literature was published in English extremely rarely. As for translations in the UK, up until 2000 there had not been a single publication of Ukrainian book in English there. Still, it doesn¿t undermine in any way several decades of work in poetry translation by one of the most famous British translators of Ukrainian literature, Vira Rich, whose texts were published.

Code-switching, commonly referred to as language mixing, is the alternating use of two or more languages within one conversational utterance. It typically occurs in bilingual settings and although it can be seen as a free and voluntary use of two languages for a pragmatic or stylistic purpose, Afrikaans-language maintenance groups in South Africa have, for over a century, stigmatised the practice of Afrikaans-English code-switching as a danger to the language¿s intrinsic value and vitality. More recently, they have feared that in today's increasingly unbalanced South African bilingual situation, English will further dominate at the expense of Afrikaans, that language contact will intensify, and that code-switching could thus be implicated in a language shift to English. This book will explore instances of intense language contact in unbalanced bilingual situations from literature. Do these attested instances confirm the fears of the Afrikaans-language maintenance advocates? Could code-switching irreversibly compromise language vitality to the point that language loss will occur and a speech community will shift from speaking Afrikaans to speaking English?