Met die lees van Antjie Krog se bundel Mede-wete (2014) asook resensie-artikels wat daaroor geskryf is, val dit die leser op dat Krog veral belangstelling toon in die werk van die Roemeens-gebore Duitse skrywer en vertaler Paul Celan (1920-1970), 'n Holocaust-oorlewende uit 'n Joodse familie. Celan se werk behels die gebruik van sekere tegnieke wat innoverende neologismes en morfologiese afwykinge insluit om woorde op te breek en iets "medemensliks" daaruit te kry en só deur verwringing 'n "nuwe taal" te skep. Krog maak kennis met dié tegnieke in 2008 tydens haar verblyf in Duitsland en maak dit haar eie nadat sy privaat onderrig oor die werk van Celan ontvang en van sy gedigte vertaal. Dié tegnieke beïndruk die leser van Mede-wete deur die wyse waarop Krog die taal en spesifiek woorde verander en nuut maak deur verskillende woordvormingsprosesse. Meer spesifiek is dit die wending weg van Standaardafrikaans wat Krog in die laaste afdeling, getiteld "vier pogings in linguistiese sinaps-opsporing", neem. In hierdie artikel word aandag gegee aan 'n morfologies-sistematiese analise van die laaste afdeling ('n korpus van 196 leksikale items) in Mede-wete. Aan die hand van die morfologiese ontledings en woordvormingsreëls van JGH Combrink (1990:53-58) word daar na die verskillende woordvormingsprosesse in Afrikaans gekyk. Die leksikale items word ook op 'n semantiese vlak in konteks met die bestaande temas in die res van die bundel geëvalueer.
In reading Antjie Krog's volume ofpoetry, Mede-wete (2014), as well as review articles written by Helize van Vuuren (2014), Marlies Taljard (2014), Louis Esterhuizen (2014), Jacomien van Niekerk (2014), Louise Viljoen (2014 and 2016), Andries Visagie (2015), Ihette Jacobs (2015) and Susan Smith (2016), it strikes the reader that Krog shows particular interest in the work of the Romanian-born German writer and translator Paul Celan (1920-1970). Paul Celan is a poet and Holocaust survivor from a Jewish family. Although he could speak several languages at a young age, he spoke and wrote German at his mother's insistence. Due to a dislike for this language (the language of his mother's killers) but also a love for it (in memory of his parents), he creates a "new language" (actually a distortion of this language) by using certain techniques to break up words and get something "humane" out of it. Krog became acquainted with these techniques during her stay in Germany in 2008 and made them her own after receiving private instruction about the work of Celan and translating some of his poems with Michael Fried (art historian and poet). According to Krog, these techniques include innovative neologisms and morphological deviations. These techniques impress the reader of Mede-wete, especially how Krog changes and revitalises words through word-formation processes. These word formation processes and techniques have also been used by other Afrikaans poets, as seen in the work ofinter alia Peter Blum ("Rooinekke op Hermanus" (Blum, 1955:9) and "Man wat mal word" (Brink, 2008:432); Breyten Breytenbach ("5", "oorlewingskuns", "Koong Byten 1" (Breytenbach, 2007: 47, 147, 152), "5.5.2", "9.1 Bedroomde woordetal dinkdinge en uithoud (Die soetpoesiegedig)" and "9.4 die nagselfie 1" (Breytenbach, 2019:94, 202, 205-206)); and Marlene van Niekerk ("Oggend van 'n waterfiskaal", "limerence 1" and "limerence 2" (Van Niekerk, 2013:9, 24, 25). Krog's latest collection of poems, plunder (pillage) (2022), also contains poems such as "dit kom nie meer op my af nie", "3. Aria vir die universum", and "6. Sanctus", in which neologistic word formation processes occur (Krog, 2022:11, 110, 113). Where Krog uses techniques that deviate morphologically from the usual forms, Van Niekerk, in her poetry collection Kaar (2013), uses different varieties of Afrikaans to distort the language. In an article in which Pieterse (2017:375) examines the variation and varieties of Van Niekerk's use of language in Kaar, he refers to Deleuze and Guattari's views about a dominant major language (which is spoken by the oppressor and also by an oppressed minority) and a minor language. The minor language arises when the major language is "deterritorialised" by grammatical errors and the change of accents, alienating the language while also "renewing" it. Stander (2012:30) also refers to a major and minor language in a study on Die sneeuslaper (2010) by Van Niekerk. Stander refers to Deleuze and Guattari's publication Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) and comments that a minor language uses the same consonants, vowels, and vocabulary as the major language, but uses it differently. Stander says this technique involves a "strategic letting go of the old". Van Niekerk uses different varieties of Afrikaans in Kaar (Pieterse, 2017:372), and Krog creates new words in Mede-wete or deforms and distorts existing words to deterritorialise Afrikaans as a dominant language. In her study of Van Niekerk's Die sneeuslaper, in which the author creates the same minor language as in Kaar, Stander (2012:112) concludes that the stuttering ("stottering") of Afrikaans may be the result of a language experiencing political pressure. By creating a new language, Van Niekerk prevents the language from stagnating and ensures that it lives on dynamically. Stander 's (2012:112) conclusion, namely the "stuttering of Afrikaans" as a result of political pressure, is similar to Krog's last four poems in Mede-wete in which she (Krog) experiences the result of political pressure on Afrikaans. Krog then creates new words to renew the language. In Krog's case, more specifically, it is the deviation from Standard Afrikaans that she uses in the last section, entitled "vier pogings in linguistiese sinaps-opsporing" ("four efforts in linguistic synapse tracing"). Until now, no research on this process has been undertaken. This article tries to describe and analyse a possible morphological systematics of the last section in Mede-wete based on the morphological analysis and word-formation rules of JGH Combrink (1990:53-58), which include REDUCTIONS (Acronyms, Clippings, Back-formations or Abbreviations), COMBINATION-FORMS (Derivations and Compounds) and other combination-forms such as Reduction derivations, Techno derivations as well as Fusions. A corpus of 196 lexical items, as a representative sample, is analysed from a morphological-systematical perspective. Furthermore, these lexical items are evaluated on a semantic level, together with existing themes in the rest of the volume, to determine whether specific processes led Krog to the formation of these neologisms, and to determine the extent to which she dealt with such processes creatively - themes such as the relationship between the self and the A/other (Taljard, 2014); man's relationship to the land in the South African political context (Van Vuuren, 2014); postcolonial differences between place and space (Taljard, 2014); violence and disorder in our land; the burden of collective guilt borne by white South Africans (Van Vuuren, 2014); the connection between land and identity (Jacobs, 2015); connections on a cosmic level (a quest for greater unity with nature and the universe) (Visagie, 2015), and, in an autobiographical manner, Krog's position in a larger picture within the South African setting with regard to kindness towards different cultures, and gender groups (Taljard, 2014).