countries (in particular South Africa) is given by H. V. Morton in his book: In Search of South Africa (London, 1948). The Huguenots were responsible for a great linguistic contribution to Afrikaans, particularly in terms of military terminology as many of them fought on the battlefields during the wars of the Great Trek. Most of the words in this list are descendants from Dutch borrowings from French, Old French or Latin, and are not direct influences from French on Afrikaans. Orthography The Afrikaans writing system is based on Dutch, using the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, plus 16 additional vowels with diacritics. The hyphen (e.g. in a compound like see-eend 'sea duck'), apostrophe (e.g. ma's 'mothers'), and a whitespace character (e.g. in multi-word units like Dooie See 'Dead Sea') is part of the orthography of words, while the indefinite article ŉ is a ligature. All the alphabet letters, including those with diacritics, have capital letters as allographs; the ŉ does not have a capital letter allograph. This means that Afrikaans has 88 graphemes with allographs in total. In Afrikaans, many consonants are dropped from the earlier Dutch spelling. For example, ('only') in Dutch becomes in Afrikaans. Also, Afrikaans and some Dutch dialects make no distinction between and , having merged the latter into the former; while the word for "south" is written in Dutch, it is spelled in Afrikaans (as well as dialectal Dutch writings) to represent this merger. Similarly, the Dutch digraph , normally pronounced as , corresponds to Afrikaans , except where it replaces the Dutch suffix which is pronounced as , as in > . Another difference is the indefinite article, in Afrikaans and in Dutch. "A book" is in Afrikaans, whereas it is either or in Dutch. This is usually pronounced as just a weak vowel, . The diminutive suffix in Afrikaans is , or , whereas in Dutch it is or , hence a "bit" is ŉ in Afrikaans and in Dutch. The letters c, q, x, and z occur almost exclusively in borrowings from French, English, Greek and Latin. This is usually because words that had c and ch in the original Dutch are spelled with k and g, respectively, in Afrikaans. Similarly original qu and x are most often spelt kw and ks, respectively. For example, instead of equatoriaal, and instead of excuus. The vowels with diacritics in non-loanword Afrikaans