I’ve been picking up on a very strange meme on the internets today and yesterday. It’s a claim that Afrikaans has no word for sane or sanity. Apart form being an absurd, and dare I say, insane claim, it’s also a good indication of the standard of Afrikaans being spoken. (Hint: The standard is poor.)

The Afrikaans word for sanity is, unsurprisingly once one reads it, “geestesgesondheid”. As in, “Hoe is jou geestesgesondheid vandag, tjomma?”. “Geestesgesondheid” is a portmanteau of the words “gees”, meaning spirit or psyche, and “gesondheid“, meaning health. The suffix “-heid”, much like the English suffix -ity, denotes a state or condition of being.

It follows then from the above that the Afrikaans word for sane is “geestesgesond”. One can get creative here if that’s too much of a mouthful. For instance, “gebalanseerd” (balanced), “uitgesorteer” (sorted) or even the stop-gap “nie mal nie” (not insane) can all be used if the context is right, so there’s never a reason to plug some English word in there like some rabid lingual anarchist on a conquest for Babel.

So, there you have it. Mystery explained.

Date: October 13, 2009
Tags: Afrikaans, geestesgesond, geestesgesondheid, myth, sane, sanity