Dutch. A linguistic history of Holland and Belgium

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12 The sixteenth century - a period of transition

As mentioned previously, a combination of linguistic and socio-political factors enable us to see the close of the fifteenth century as the end of the Middle Dutch period and the end of the Middle Ages. The century ahead was to be one of enormous social upheaval in Europe in general, but in the Netherlands in particular. The Reformaton, the so-called Renaissance in European throught, as well as the Eighty Years' War, were all to contribute to revolutionary changes in the economics and society of the Low Countries. Several of these changes were reflected in the language in various ways and thus make sixteenth century Dutch a worthy yet often neglected object of study.

Just as the sixteenth century is a period of transition in society, a period in which, certainly in the Netherlands, economic prosperity and thus political power shifted once and for all from the first and second estates to the third, to the bourgeoisie, so it can also be regarded linguistically as a period of transition. For obvious reasons, the division one traditionally makes between Middle and Modern Dutch in 1500 is in fact an artificial one invented by scholars of a later age. In reality there was a continuum and many of the characteristics of Modern Dutch were not commonplace until well into the sixteenth century.

The Reformation, sparked off by the publication of Martin Luther's 95 theses in Wittemberg in 1517, soon made itself felt in the Netherlands. With the new faith came a desire to have a new Bible in the vernacular, tailored to the needs of the Protestants. The 1520's already saw the first Bible translations, chiefly the New Testament, into Dutch. Such translations, of which the best known is the Van Liesveldt Bible (1526-42) from Antwerp, inevitably drew on their Latin and Luther's German predecessors. However, the advent of Calvinism in the Low Countries necessitated a new translation, preferably side-stepping the Lutheran precedents and going back to the original languages. This was not to be the case until the Statenvertaling was compiled in the seventeenth century, however. The Calvinist Bible was ultimately a revised version of the Van Liesveldt Bible. This Bible remained the most popular translation in the Protestant northern Netherlands until the completion of the Statenvertaling in the 1630's. The Catholics of Brabant had their own translation, the Bible of Louvain (1548).

At this time there were attempts by Protestant groups, for example the Mennonites, to reconcile eastern Dutch and Low German in religious publications in order to increase the area of influence. There was, for instance, a Low German translation of Luther's Bible which could be better understood in the east of Holland than those in Dutch. But eastern linguistic forms were not acceptable to western printers and readers; ultimately the overwhelming influence of Brabant and later Holland was not to be halted.

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Leeraar, now spelt leraar and meaning (secondary) teacher, formerly meant preacher, as it still does in Afrikaans. In 17th-century Holland many preachers were southern émigrés who were thus in a position to contribute further to the influence Brabants was having on urban Hollands (see p. 101).
Taken from J. and C. Luiken, 100 Ambachten, Amsterdam, 1694.

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Not only the Dutch of the scriptures but also that of the predikanten exerted an influence on the language of the people at large. Once the Eighty Year's War began in 1568 and more and more emigrants began to leave the southern Netherlands for the north, a disproportionate number of southerners were to be found in the pulpits and schoolrooms of the north where their Brabants dialect was revered and considered worthy of imitation.

Also the chambers of rhetoric, although known in the closing stages of the Middle Ages, had their hey-day in the sixteenth century. These chambers were in effect societies of usually well-to-do people who regularly held gatherings at which they put on plays or recited and sang their latest literary creations; cultivation of the vernacular as a worthy instrument of cultural expression was encouraged. The chambers, called rederijkerskamers in Dutch, originated in the south and when the idea took hold in the north, there was inevitably a linguistic legacy to the south here also which was strengthened by the ever increasing number of Flemings and Brabanders that arrived in the northern Netherlands after 1568. By this time Flemish had already lost the battle to Brabants as the dialect on which emergent standard Dutch seemed as if it was going to be based.

One should remember at this point that by the middle of the sixteenth century, Antwerp had developed into the most important city in Europe north of the Alps. As part of the Habsburg Empire, which included Spain and her colonies and also included Portugal after 1580, Antwerp formed the economic hub of a world-wide trading empire with contacts stretching from the Baltic and the Mediterranean to the Americas and the Far East. The merchants and bankers of Antwerp were the financial backers of both Spanish and Portuguese mercantile ventures in the New World.

When Antwerp finally fell to the Spaniards in 1585 and the mouth of the river Scheldt, on which all of Antwerp's good fortune hinged, was blocked, the bell had tolled for the trend-setting dialect of Brabant. A mass emigration of wealthy, respectable burghers, many of them Protestants or Jews, left the southern Netherlands for the cities of the north, above all Amsterdam. From this time on, the position which Brabants had enjoyed in the Netherlands prior to 1585 was assumed by the dialect of the province of Holland. The number of southern immigrants, and above all the influence which the southerners continued to exert in the north after 1585, meant however that Hollands now underwent considerable brabantisation. The fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the cities of the north became melting pots for Netherlanders from all over the Low Countries, due to the prosperity which accompanied Holland's mercantile enterprise, is undoubtedly one of the most important reasons why the language of that region was to form the perfect basis for the standard language. London had already fulfilled a similar function in England prior to this time, as had Paris in France.

The southerners in the cities of the north, occupying as they did many important

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Education in the 17th century was still quite rudimentary on the whole (see p. 96), but here too the contribution of the southern Netherlands to northern culture was considerable (see p. 101).
Taken from J. and C. Luiken, 100 Ambachten, Amsterdam, 1694.

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positions in trading circles, government, education, the army and the church, enjoyed an elite status. Although of course never in the majority, they formed nevertheless a sizeable minority of the population - in 1622, 30% of the population of Amsterdam were immigrants. But the influence they exerted, not least in linguistic issues, was enormous. It is believed, for instance, that the shifts of î > ij and ŷ > ui^1. which occurred in the post Middle Dutch period and are now part of ABN, were new fashionable pronunciations introduced into the north by the Brabanders in whose dialect the sounds had already shifted some time before; this in turn can account for ŷ (also û) having been retained in rural areas outside the province of Holland where the influence of the urban southerners was less felt (see map 10). Equally many of the words nowadays often labelled as schrijftaal, i.e. words that are seldom used in the everyday spoken Dutch north of the rivers, are in fact words of Brabants origin which are still common in southern speech, while their equivalents in natural speech are the indigenous Hollands forms e.g. gans - heel (whole), gaarne - graag (gladly), thans - nu (now), lieden - lui (people), wenen - huilen (to cry), gij - jij (you), reeds - al (already), schoon - mooi (beautiful), werpen - gooien (to throw), zeer - heel/erg (very), zenden - sturen (to send). The ‘reverence’ with which such words are now regarded is reminiscent of the status Brabants must have enjoyed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.

One of the most important sources of sixteenth century Dutch is the Dictionarium (1574), known after the reprint of 1599 as the Etymologicum, by Kiliaen who worked with Plantin in Antwerp. This book stands at the beginning of a long tradition of lexicography in the Netherlands. In the dictionary all Dutch words are accompanied by their equivalents in Latin, as well as attempts to classify the words as Flemish, Hollands, Frisian etc. The etymologies are often unreliable, however. This important sixteenth century book remained a standard reference work for centuries, particularly before the appearance of Verdam's Middelnederlands Woordenboek. In addition, it was frequently used in the north as a Latin-Dutch dictionary, a Dutch that was distinctly Brabants in flavour.

The sixteenth century also saw the first serious attempts to standardise spelling, in imitation of Latin and French. Spelling was to be of greater importance to many language reformers in the centuries ahead than grammar. On the other hand, there were to be writers who delighted in the very fact that the spelling could be varied. Most attempts to standardise, however, were based on a particular dialect.

The first important work that attempted to evolve a national spelling that stood above the individual dialects was Pontus de Heuiter's Nederduitse Orthographie (1581). De Heuiter, a cleric who was born in Delft but who had travelled widely throughout the northern and southern Netherlands, was far ahead of his time in, for example, recommendations to write single e and o in open syllables (see p. 40) and to abolish superfluous letters in common combinations such as gh (Ghent - now Gent), ck (ick - now ik).

But attempts to standardise language that are not based on real circimstances are seldom successful. However H.L. Spieghel's Tweespraack van de Nederduitsche Letterkunst (1584), probably the best known of all early books on the Dutch language, was based on the language of Amsterdam. This meant it was, in effect, just as parochial as the other works of the time, but Amsterdam was moving economically and thus socially more and more into a position to be able to dictate,

1. The letter y is used in this book to indicate the high rounded vowel which is written as u/uu in Dutch e.g. muren/muur - a value it has in the International Phonetic Alphabet. In German and in other texts the symbol ü is sometimes used to render this sound but that is avoided here because I have attributed a different value to it (see p. 48). Map 10 does, however, use ü for the sound which I reproduce here with y.

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also in linguistic issues, to the rest of the country. This book is an important source of information on the sounds of the dialect of Amsterdam in the late sixteenth century; for example, Spieghel mentions that ij and ui were still pronounced as î and ŷ and were thus not yet pronounced as they are now. But Spieghel discusses grammar too. He, like many after him, felt that certain simplifications which spoken Dutch had undergone by that time amounted to an impoverishment of the language. For example, he advocated reviving the distinction between the nominative and the acusative, but then in a way that had never existed even at the time before the two had fallen together - namely both masculine and feminine nouns could, according to Spieghel, take den in the accusative; he also recommended genitive forms such as des vrouws, in imitation of the masculine and neuter. In prescribing such artificial forms, he represented the current Renaissance philosophy that it was the task of grammarians to cultivate the vernacular, regardless of what the practice in everyday speech was. Spieghel's language was that of the upper circles of Amsterdam society with the addition of learned distinctions that had either disappeared from, or never existed in the language. This attitude to the written language was to remain for a long time to come, in fact till the truly scientific approach to language study in the nineteenth century.

The Renaissance encouraged nationalism and with nationalism came a greater interest in the vernaculars of Europe. Thus the above attempts to standardise the spelling and grammar of Dutch, but this philosophy was also reflected in growing purism, above all in moves to purify the language of French loan words. It was common at this time, however, to resort to German words in an attempt to rid Dutch of French influence, the division between Dutch and German not being felt to be as strong in the sixteenth century as it is now. (See the term Nederduits p.4). An important name in the context of purism is that of the mathematician Simon Stevin, a Fleming who migrated to the north. He preferred Hollands to his native Flemish and many of his purisms in the language of mathematics are still with us today e.g. driehoek (triangle), aftrekken (to substract), delen (to divide), wortel (root).

Bibliography

VOOYS, C.G.N. de Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Taal. Wolters-Noordhoff, Groningen, 1970. Chapter 3 of this book deals with the sixteenth century.

DIBBETS, G.R.W. ‘Grammaticale geschriften uit de zestiende eeuw’. Chapter 2 in Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse taalkunde by D.M. Bakker (ed.) and G.R.W. Dibbets (ed.). Malmberg, Den Bosch, 1977. Further detail on the contributions of sixteenth century grammarians to the study of Dutch.

MEIJER, R.P. Literature of the Low Countries. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1978. Chapter 4 of this book gives a synopsis of the literature of the sixteenth century.

The following books are good, non-specialist texts on the general history of the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which are highly recommended as background.

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MURRAY, G.G. Antwerp in the age of Plantin and Brueghel. David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1972.

MURRAY, G.G. Amsterdam in the age of Rembrandt. David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1972.

WILSON, C. The Dutch Republic. World University Library, London, 1968.

PRICE, J.L. Culture and society in the Dutch Republic. Batsford, London, 1974.

HALEY, K.H.D. The Dutch in the seventeenth century. Thames and Hudson, London, 1972.