“ <i>Ik heef niets gezeg</i> ”: the past tense in an Anglo-Boer War concentration camp diary

Abstract This paper presents a case study of the writing of the young woman Rensche van der Walt in her personal diary during the Anglo-Boer War, specifically 1901 to 1902. A corpus of about 24,000 words was compiled from the diary, detailing the personal experiences of Van der Walt in concentration camps during the war. This study focuses on her use of the past tense to determine the extent to which it aligns with modern Afrikaans norms rather than Dutch norms, and it is contextualized against a control corpus of letters written during the same war. The results show that Van der Walt uses the Dutch preterit to a limited extent, while the modern Afrikaans past tense (based on the Dutch perfect) is the preferred choice. This aligns with the usage in the letter corpus. However, the past participles used in the diary are more regularized, with much fewer inflectional markings than in the letters, indicating that Van der Walt is slightly ahead of her time regarding this development – it is not unexpected, as young women are known to lead the adoption of new variants during periods of language change. The findings also shed light on the extent of variation still present in the past tense use of semi-literate writers of early Afrikaans, a topic which has not received much attention in corpus-based studies yet.