Afrikaans Self-Taught: By The Natural Method With Phonetic Pronunciation (Thimm?S System)

The author reveals that the work for this book was commenced by his father. Owing to his untimely demise, it was his privilege to collect and arrange the manuscripts of this book which he did including editing and proofreading to make the book a worth readable and informative. The writer emphasizes that the aim of Marlborough?s Phonetic System is to make use of such signs that anyone who speaks English, by reading them naturally, will correctly pronounce the Afrikaans. To prevent confusion arising from the various ways in which many sounds are represented in English, the principle has been laid down that each sound in the new language shall be separately represented. Each phonetic sign must be pronounced in the same manner throughout the book. Moreover, Afrikaans, one of the two official languages of South Africa, is a dialect of Nederlands (Dutch), and may rightly be said to be debilitated because it has lost most of the inflexions of Nederlands. Afrikaans is a dialect of Nederlands in the same sense as English is of AngloSaxon. Both languages are greatly deflected and consequently on the same level.