Praat Afrikaans of hou jou bek.

After the orphanage, we stepped into the shi to do a bit of shopping. I wanted to pick up a backpack for Thailand (now Thailand/Singapore) and a book on Japanese verbs (as verbs are the foundations of conversations. The rest are just bricks and mortar, with the onomatope being paintings from afar.)

In Maruzen, the "English section" bookshop where all the literature junkies go for their next hit, I cruised the aisles in search of my next escape from reality. They had a big sale on DIY language books that looked like someone found it in the back of the storeroom, forgotten after the 1986 sale, before Swahili was fashionable. I was about to turn away from the reminder that there are just too many languages and not enough time on earth, when I saw it. In garish, shiny orange, the koeksisters filled the cover in an almost perverse fashion. And there it was:

I flipped out. In the middle of this strange, foreign country where no one knows what I mean when I say "mos" or "sommer". I bought the book for the price of 2 vending machine green teas, and proceeded to to force-feed some of my friends tit-bits of Afrikaans information. (Tit-bits?)

Who else was going to buy it? I can't imagine some young Jap student going "Hey, let me spend hours on learning a language that is one of 11 in a country that no one knows of, and with this book I'll be able to not even pronounce it correctly!"

So, after this weekend, a series of random people will be all over the world in a few years, carrying with them knowledge of the bastard child of Dutch, the youngest language on earth, thick with history and memories. The language that grew up too fast.