5.1 Kaaps

5.1 Kaaps

by © 6th September 2020 Peter Snyders supported by Unison Music and Literature

Even though I have a very large Kaaps wordlist, I prefer to keep myself in the background. I was asked to be one of three adjudicators for the translation of the first eight verses in the Bible from English to Kaaps. After the competition we asked Litnet to give us the names of the competitors. There were twenty of them, but we could only contact eight of them. We used the Litnet numbers assigned to them. The names and numbers are given below:

 1.  Kyle Deon Manuel

 2.  Denver Breda

 5.  Christo Meyer

 8.  Ivor Swartz

11. Ilne Fourie

12. Rovwena Bestenbier

19. Hendry Kortje

20. Hein Kleinbooi

In future, we will give your name and number when we show how you applied the rule, but if there are a few of you, we may have to give only the number to save space and time.

There is no copyright on words; if there were we would not be able to speak and write. Also, we do not know who first created the word. But we are doing our best to credit the source from which we obtained our examples.

While on this point, please note that we show you the rule, but how you apply the rule is all up to you. The first principle of writing down a language is: We write the way we speak. When we get to the phase of making a dictionary of Kaaps we will use rules to decide what is the best word and spelling to use. So, continue writing the way you speak. This means that there can be several ways to apply the rule. So, do not change your spelling. When we look at the spelling rules to use by convention i.e. by mutual consent, we will look at all the options. Think of rules as options.

We said earlier that languages that only use the five main vowels do not need to create new vowels by simply expressing them in versions higher and/or lower, further forward and/or backward in the mouth or writing vowels together like the ee and oo as in the Afrikaans words for been (leg or bone) and hoor for hear.

Languages, like isiXhosa and isiZulu that also use the five main vowels do not have such sounds and diphthongs or other such means of adding new words to the inventory (collection of sounds).

They use other means that are foreign to the West such as clicks, unusual consonant combinations such as dl and hl and aspiration or ejection (the phoneme, syllable or word is thrust out by an added gust of air) as in isi-Xhosa and isi-Zulu languages.

The aspirated word, similar to Kora, is accompanied with an h such as the two isiXhosa words bala (count) and bhala (write). These two words have different meanings due to the aspiration. Kora also uses tonality. Please read this up yourself in Chapter Three (3) under 3.4 The Kora system of tone melodies in. Prof. Du Plessis’s Kora. Later we will explain simply how tonality works  using the punctuation system of the West.

So, now you also know why Kaaps is a musical language e.g. “Djy moet buk vi jou geluk.” (Used by a hawker in Gatesville to advise that the bargains are on the ground.) We inherited this wonderful tuneful way of speaking Kaaps from our Khoikhoi ancestors. We will not be investigating clicks, aspirations and tonalities at all – not even in the other four phases of Kaaps because these have obviously not survived in any of the phases given below:

1.     Pidgin (the origin of a language.)  This the Kora-Dutch phase.

2.     Creole (when the pidgin is spoken by the young as a new language. In South Africa this phase has been helped on by slaves, further Kora speakers, and some Western languages that settled here.)

3.     English phase (It became especially contributory to Kaaps after the settlement of many English from 1820 and onwards.)

4.     Afrikaans phase. (This phase forced Afrikaans down onto Coloureds and blacks since 1948 when the Afrikaners began ruling the politics.)

5.     Modern Kaaps phase. (This phase was started by S.V. Petersen, Adam Small and yours truly before 1994 but before and after this date, Kaaps took over the reins and began to swell along many fronts.)

Besides the above, Kaaps did not have the luxury of being recorded by any means until quite recently (including yourselves). That which hás been written in books are superficial and biasedly influenced by the vanquishers. So, much of our language has been lost to Afrikaans that claimed Kaaps’s linguistic creations as their own accomplishments.

Please also keep in mind that all other influences other than those by the Dutch and Kora in 1652 must be excluded. Even the Kora has changed, and if not much, the dictionary that Prof. Du Plessis compiled of her own research together with those former excellent field workers, is our foundation, but it too is limited.

If you have not yet downloaded Kora, please click onto the link below and do so.

https://sahistory.org.za/archive/kora-lost-khoisan-language-early-cape-and-gariep-menan-du-plessis