Dutch. A linguistic history of Holland and Belgium

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10 Sources of written Dutch prior to 1100^1.

The arrival of the church in the Netherlands, and the establishment of monasteries and nunneries that accompanied it, brought literacy back to the area for the first time since the departure of the Romans. But this does not, unfortunately, mean that there are texts in the vernacular surviving from this time. Although it is highly likely that texts were written in Low Franconian during the so-called Carolingian renaissance, none have come down to us from this early period.^2. They can never have been great in number because of the predominance of Latin, and those that did exist would most likely have been in the possession of religious centres, the bastions of literacy. One can assume that psalms and prayers, biblical passages and possibly even some secular literature were written down in the Low Franconian dialects of the Netherlands; we know that this was definitely the case in other parts of the Franconian empire, namely France and Germany, where some texts have been preserved. It is quite likely that the accessability of the monasteries of the Netherlands by water made them easy and attractive prey for the heathen Vikings who continually plundered the Dutch coast for a period of two hundred years (circa 800-1000), stealing from the monasteries and even razing them to the ground. This is the very period from which the earliest High German texts date - monasteries in the south of Germany were safe from Viking attack.

The lack of any Low Franconian texts from the earliest period has meant that historical linguists have had to make do with Dutch names^3. and glosses in the Latin texts that have been preserved from this period. In this regard G. Mansion's Oud-Gentsche Naamkunde, a study of Low Franconian names in Latin documents from Ghent in the ninth and tenth centuries, has become an indispensable source of information on the earliest Dutch. Germanic words denoting typically Germanic concepts in Latin texts such as the Lex Salica, for example, are another source of information. Often Germanic glosses, i.e. translations written between the lines or in the margin of Latin manuscripts for better understanding of the text, have been preserved and offer some compensation for the lack of running texts in the vernacular; part of the Wachtendonk Psalms, an Old East Low Franconian text

1. It is customary to refer to Dutch during this period as Old West Low Franconian.

2. Charlemagne's biographer, Einhard (died 840), mentions that Charles ‘directed that the age-old narrative poems... in which were celebrated the warlike deeds of the kings of ancient times, should be written out and so preserved. He also began a grammar of his native tongue’. (Einhard and Notker the Stammerer: Two Lives of Charlemagne, Penguin, London 1969, p. 82)

3. The study of peoples's names and place names, a popular academic pursuit in the Netherlands, is called onomastics.

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from the German Rhineland, has come down to us in this form. There have been several attempts by philologists to compile a grammar of Old Dutch based on these meagre remains. The student of Old English or Old High German is much more fortunate in this respect.

Bibliography

VOOYS, C.G.N. de Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Taal. Wolters-Noordhoff, Groningen, 1970. The best known and most readable account of the external history of the Dutch language. Regarded as a standard work. Chapter 1 deals with the sources of written Dutch prior to 1200.

GIJSSELING, M. Corpus van Middelnederlandse teksten (tot en met het jaar 1300). The Hague, 1976. This momentous work is a collection of every Dutch text, whether a literary or lay document, that has been preserved from prior to 1300.

LOEY, A. van ‘Altniederländisch und Mittelniederländisch’, in Kurzer Grundriβ der gerntanischen Philologie bis 1500, Band I. L.E. Schmitt (ed.) De Gruyter, Berlin, 1970.