Also, while I'm posting about South African history:
It's pronounced Up-Hard-Hate, with the stress on the second syllable. I've heard some foreigners, doubtless well-intentioned, pronouncing it Appar-Theyd. It's a compound word, where the t is the last letter of "apart", and the h is the first letter of "heid". You don't pronounce the "th" like you would in "thick" or "with", but pronounce them separately like in "butthead".
@passenger ......oh
@passenger
I dont care how it's Spelt or pronounced. I do care about how many lives it destroyed
@passenger Appar-Theyd is a new failure state to me. I’d always heard ap-PART-hide in the southern US. Your transcription makes sense of the Dutch origin; not coincidentally it renders the spelling comparable to Scots.
Yeah, that's a pretty common pronounciation too. It's one of these words which everyone sees written down rather than hears spoken, so there are probably all sorts of pronounciations out there.
To mispronounce a word because you've only ever seen it written down means that you read more widely than your contemporaries. It is a badge of great honour.
@passenger @cwicseolfor
At least here on the west coast; I've mostly heard it pronounced apart-hide with the emphasis on the last syllable. And that pronunciation is used in the media as well as in private.
I did a momentary double-take there and thought you were also South African before I realised you meant the west coast of some other country.
"Wait, is laprice from St Helena Bay or somewhere?"
Oct 24, 2026, 9:45 AM@passenger Yes, in Dutch (and I think in Afrikaans), -heid is a suffix that turns the basic word into a more general concept. In English, this would be similar to appending -ty (humani-ty, or beau-ty). Apart (being separate) as a concept is apartheid.
Yeah, it denotes a state of being, turning "separate" into "separateness."
Or, as it's more often translated, "segregation."