Proverb Collection: Nature and Farm Life

Afrikaans grew up on the farm, and its proverbs still smell of the kraal, the veld and the lands. The oldest sayings reach for the animals their first speakers lived among — the barking dog, the cunning jackal, the slow ox, the cackling hen — and through those images they encode a whole rural worldview: distrust the loudmouth, watch the quiet schemer, shape the young while you can. This third collection gathers ten such proverbs (distinct from the sets on collection one and collection two), each verified against printed Afrikaans proverb sources, and uses each to teach one advanced grammar point — fronting, the comparative, the cleft, the relative clause, and the genre's near-total preference for the indicative over the subjunctive.

1. Blaffende honde byt nie

Meaning: people who make the most noise and threats are the least dangerous; bluster rarely turns into action.

Grammar — the present-participle adjective. The first word, blaffende ("barking"), is a present participle (blaf + -ende) pressed into service as an attributive adjective in front of its noun honde. Afrikaans builds these freely — lopende (running), kokende (boiling), brullende (roaring) — and being adjectives they already carry the attributive ending, so you never add a further -e. Note too the bare nie with no partner: when nie is the whole negation and ends the clause, Afrikaans does not double it. The doubling only kicks in when something follows the first nie.

2. 'n Jakkals verloor wel sy hare, maar nie sy streke nie

Meaning: a sly person may change on the surface — grow older, look respectable — but stays cunning underneath. People don't really change their nature.

Grammar — the concessive particle wel and a contrastive maar. The little word wel ("indeed, certainly") concedes the first half — yes, the jackal does lose its hair — precisely so the maar ("but") can overturn it: ...but not its tricks. This wel ... maar nie frame is a favourite Afrikaans way of granting a point in order to defeat it. verloor ("lose") is an inseparable ver- verb — note it would take no ge- in the past (het verloor). And streke ("tricks, ruses") is the everyday plural of streek in this fixed sense.

3. Jakkals prys sy eie stert

Meaning: people sing their own praises; everyone talks up what is theirs. Said of a boaster, or of someone defending their own dubious work.

Grammar — the article-less proverbial subject and invariable eie. Notice there is no die: bare Jakkals, used almost as a character's name, the way fables treat the jackal as a stock trickster. Dropping the article gives the line a folk-tale, timeless ring. The possessive sy ("its") needs no article of its own — sy eie stert, never "die sy stert" — and eie ("own") is one of the rare attributive adjectives that never takes -e: always bare, eie stert, eie huis, eie mening. The whole thing sits in the generic present (prys), stating a standing truth.

4. Buig die boompie terwyl dit jonk is

Meaning: shape a child's character early, while they are still malleable; correct a habit before it sets. Train them young.

Grammar — the imperative plus a verb-final terwyl-clause. The line opens with a bare imperative — Buig ("bend!"), no subject, exactly as English drops "you." Then comes a subordinate clause introduced by terwyl ("while"), and like every Afrikaans subordinator it drives its verb to the end: terwyl dit jonk is — the copula is lands last, after the adjective jonk. The diminutive boompie ("little tree") does double work: it softens the image and makes the child-as-sapling metaphor explicit. You will also hear ...terwyl hy jonk is.

5. Elke voël sing soos hy gebek is

Meaning: everyone speaks and acts according to their own nature and upbringing; you can't expect people to be other than what they are.

Grammar — the comparative soos-clause and a passive remnant. The conjunction soos ("as, the way that") introduces a clause of manner — soos hy gebek is — and again the verb goes last (is). The striking part is gebek: a participle-like form meaning roughly "beaked, equipped with a beak," and gebek is functions as a frozen passive ("is [the way it was] beaked / given its beak"). It is one of those fossilised constructions proverbs preserve long after ordinary speech has moved on. The universal quantifier elke ("every") takes a singular noun — elke voël, never "elke voëls."

6. As een skaap deur die hek is, volg al die ander

Meaning: people imitate blindly; let one person break ranks or set an example and the rest stream after, sheep-like. The Afrikaans take on herd mentality.

Grammar — the as-clause and V2 inversion. The proverb opens with a fronted conditional/temporal as-clause (As een skaap deur die hek is — "once one sheep is through the gate"). Because that whole clause occupies first position, the main clause inverts: the verb volg ("follow") jumps in front of its subject — volg al die ander, not "al die ander volg." This is the verb-second rule, the backbone of Afrikaans word order: front anything, and the finite verb takes the very next slot. al die ander ("all the others") is the bare quantifier al plus die ander.

7. 'n Esel stoot hom nie twee keer aan dieselfde klip nie

Meaning: even a "stupid" animal learns from a painful experience and avoids repeating it — so a person certainly should. Once burnt, twice shy.

Grammar — the reflexive hom and the full nie ... nie frame. The verb stoot ("bump, push") here is reflexive: hom ("itself") is the donkey acting on itself, where English uses "-self." Afrikaans often uses the plain object pronoun (hom, haar, hulle) for the reflexive rather than a dedicated form. Around it runs the textbook nie ... nie negation: the first nie sits after the verb, and the second nie closes the entire clause as its final word, with everything negated — twee keer aan dieselfde klip — caught between the two. dieselfde ("the same") is written as one word.

8. Die henne wat die meeste kekkel, lê nie die meeste eiers nie

Meaning: the biggest talkers achieve the least; loud self-advertisement is no measure of real output. Compare the English "empty vessels make the most noise."

Grammar — a relative clause plus the superlative die meeste. The subject die henne is modified by a verb-final relative clause — wat die meeste kekkel ("that cackle the most"), with the verb last as always after wat. Then the main clause delivers the contrast. The phrase die meeste ("the most") appears twice: it is the irregular superlative of baie/veel used for quantity, the counterpart of English "the most." Note the proverb threads a relative clause into a nie ... nie-negated main clause — exactly the embedded-clause shape that makes the genre worth studying.

9. Dis nie die koei wat die hardste bulk wat die meeste melk gee nie

Meaning: the same lesson as the hens, in cattle form — the noisiest is not the most productive. A staple of farm wisdom about quiet, steady workers.

Grammar — the cleft sentence dis ... wat. This is a textbook cleft: dis (a contraction of dit is, "it is") foregrounds die koei, and a relative wat-clause carries the real predicate — "it is not the cow ... that gives the most milk." Clefting is how Afrikaans, like English, throws spotlight emphasis onto one element. The sentence even stacks two relative clauses on the same noun: wat die hardste bulk (which bellows loudest) and wat die meeste melk gee (that gives the most milk). The whole frame is negated by nie ... nie, with the final nie sealing the line. Watch bulk here means "bellow," not the English noun "bulk."

10. 'n Ou bok lus ook wel 'n groen blaartjie

Meaning: said, half-teasing, of an older man who takes an interest in a much younger woman — "there's life in the old goat yet." A wry comment on age and desire. (You also hear the comparative form Hoe ouer die bok, hoe groener die blaartjies — "the older the goat, the greener the leaves it fancies.")

Grammar — the hoe ... hoe comparative. The variant form shows off the hoe ... hoe construction — "the [more] ..., the [more] ..." — the Afrikaans correlative comparative: Hoe ouer die bok, hoe groener die blaartjies. Each half fronts a comparative adjective (ouer, groener), and the two move in lockstep. In the short form the focus particle ook ("too, also") and the concessive wel ("indeed") together do the wink — even an old goat fancies a green leaf too, just like anyone. The diminutive blaartjie keeps the tone light and teasing rather than crude.

A note on the subjunctive

Because the brief for this set asked for a subjunctive remnant, it is worth being honest: farm proverbs almost never contain one. Afrikaans, more thoroughly than Dutch or German, has replaced subjunctive forms with the indicative, with sou + infinitive, or with as-conditionals. The handful of genuine subjunctive fossils that survive — ware dit nie dat... ("were it not that..."), mag dit goed gaan ("may it go well") — belong to a literary or liturgical register, not to the earthy, indicative-driven world of the kraal and the lands. The full inventory is on subjunctive remnants. The lesson of this collection is the reverse one: notice how relentlessly the indicative generic present does all the work.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Farm proverbs encode a rural worldview — distrust the loud (hens, cows, dogs), watch the cunning (jackal), shape the young (the sapling) — through animals their first speakers lived among.
• The genre runs on the indicative generic present; the subjunctive is essentially absent from it, surviving only in literary and liturgical fossils — see subjunctive remnants.
• Watch for the advanced structures on display: fronting + V2 inversion (volg al die ander), the cleft (dis ... wat), stacked relative clauses (wat ... bulk wat ... gee), and the hoe ... hoe comparative.
• The nie ... nie frame doubles only when material follows the first nie; a clause-final nie alone stays single (byt nie).
• All ten are attested in printed Afrikaans proverb collections and contain no derogatory language.