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Dutch. A linguistic history of Holland and Belgium (1983)

Dutch. A linguistic history of Holland and Belgium

(1983)–Bruce Donaldson–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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13 The seventeenth century - the birth of ABN

The seventeenth century is the period in which the language of the mediaeval county of Holland, together with Utrecht, found itself in an unchallenged position to take the lead and assert itself as the basis for the standard. There is by this time no shortage of texts in the Hollands dialect. Even something of the language of the lower echalons of society, particularly in Amsterdam, is known thanks to the popular farces which were produced in public for the entertainment of the common people. Many of these farces, which attempted to capture the colour of local speech, were written by the great pens of the day.

In upper circles the seventeenth century was a period in which southern and northern elements, but particularly the latter, combined to form the basis of what we will come to know as ABN. For a long time, however, the Brabanders and Flemings lived in specific areas and tended to marry also within the émigré community.

In the Spaanse Brabander, one of the best known comedies of the age, which was written by the northern playwright G.A. Bredero, some of the humour is derived from ridiculing the exaggeratedly Antwerp speech of the main character, above all the excessive number of French loan words. However, this is but one reflection of the attitudes to language in the literature of seventeenth century Holland.

From this time on in particular, the gap between the language of the cities of Holland with their large immigrant populations, and that of the surrounding countryside must have begun to widen. The east and even the south could no longer compete with the cities of Holland in the formation of a standard Dutch. Beschaafd was the language of the upper urban circles, where a certain blend of northern and southern forms had occurred, whereas plat was the language of the common people, where the differences from the language of the adjacent platteland were minimal. This is similar to the situation today where the speech of the lower classes of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht, for example, is not what one can call ABN, although those dialects are readily intelligible to speakers of western ABN. In time the language of the upper classes of the cities of Holland was to grow together, but for a long time the strong particularism of the various regions of the Netherlands, still evident today, acted as a brake on such developments.

Dutch vocabulary underwent enormous expansion at this time due to advances in all aspects of science and learning and as a result of contact with an ever widening world. From the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch were no longer functioning merely as middlemen but were themselves actively trading in the Far East and the Americas. This is also the time in which French established itself unequivocally as the language of diplomacy and international dealings. Thus the influence of French also came via channels other than the often bilingual southern émigrés who were

resident in the north. Although French loan words were more common in the language of the upper circles, a certain number were to percolate down to the lowest levels on the social ladder in the course of time, sometimes to the extent that even there such loans were able to displace indigenous Dutch words e.g. abuis (mistaken), chagrijnig (cantankerous), lerares (female teacher, where the French ending -es has replaced the indigenous ending -in), proberen (to try - the Dutch words pogen en trachten now belong to more elevated style).

From the middle of the sixteenth century, but particularly after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, many French Huguenots, who, like the Brabants-Flemish refugees of a century before, were wealthy, upper class people, began to arrive in the northern Netherlands in search of religious tolerance - more than 100,000 after 1685. They formed yet another element that favoured the position of French as an upper class language and thus worthy of imitation and borrowing. A final echo of their arrival in the Netherlands, and the respect they and their language enjoyed, is to be found in the presence of a Waalse Kerk1. (where Waals = French) in all the larger towns; attendance at the French language services in these churches still seems to have a certain snob value.

The citizens of the Dutch Republic, the beginnings of which had been the Union of Utrecht in 1579, realized very early that racial and religious tolerance was more profitable than the alternative which was the norm in most other countries. The religious tolerance that reigned in seventeenth century Holland was of course only a relative tolerance i.e. relative to the situation in Spain and France at the time for example, for only Calvinists could occupy public office. The resulting influx of immigrants that began in the late sixteenth century and continued on through the seventeenth century attracting southern Netherlanders, Huguenots and Iberian Jews to Holland brought unprecedented prosperity to the country. The presence of such large minority groups, and the international contacts they brought with them, contributed to the development of an ABN based on the language of the cities of Holland and consequently the common assertion that Hollands is Nederlands and Holland is the Netherlands (see p. 6). The great men of letters of the day, for this was the Golden Age in literature too, were of various backgrounds typical of the times: Constantijn Huygens, whose mother was from Antwerp and whose paternal relatives were originally from Breda, was brought up in The Hague; G.A. Bredero was a Hollander through and through who reacted against the Brabants dialect in his writings; P.C. Hooft was an Amsterdammer and leader of the influential circle of writers known as the Muiderkring; J. Cats, although a Zeelander, was educated at Leiden University and spent most of his life in South Holland; J. van den Vondel, the son of Brabanders, lived and wrote in the Brabants-Flemish community of Amsterdam but even he shows a clear preference for northern forms in his later works. Such people, in cultivating a standard written Dutch, often advocated forms for the written language which had either never existed or no longer existed in the spoken language. They played an important role in the development of a grammar of standard Dutch and their literary work would be revered for generations to come as the classical period in Dutch letters. Many of the archaisms which

became part and parcel of written Dutch at this time were to burden the language right up to the present century.

Of course the written word always lags behind the spoken word in all languages, preserving certain traditions that are no longer current in speech, but in the case of Dutch this was particularly so because of the reintroduction of archaic distinctions in gender and case inflections that had ceased to be functional during the development of mediaeval Dutch into a more analytical language. For example, one such artificial distinction that still exists in written style today is that between hen (accusative) and hun (dative) when in effect the former is simply a phonetically unrounded variant of the latter.

At the Synod of Dordrecht, which took place in 1618-19 at the end ofa long period of internal political conflict between orthodox and liberal Calvinists which saw the former victoring, it was decided that a new standard Bible, translated directly from the original Greek and Hebrew of the scriptures, was required for the Republic of the Seven United Provinces. The language of all existing Bibles up to that time was heavily southern. A committee of translators from all over the Netherlands was commissioned by the States General, the government of the Republic, to translate both the New and the Old Testaments into a modern Dutch which would not favour the dialect of one area over that of another. Thus concessions were made on and off to Flemish, Brabants, Hollands and Frisian. Of the various forms ofa word that often existed, a choice was made and many standard ABN forms we now know are the result of these often arbitrary decisions e.g. for the past tense of beginnen (to begin) a choice had to be made between begon, begost, begonst and began - begon was chosen and is now ABN2.. Similarly du was not given official recognition but was replaced by gij (see p. 171). After years of debate and revision the so-called Statenvertaling (State Translation) appeared in 1637; because of its predecessors it was however still quite southern in flavour. The role that it played in the establishment of the standard language is as important to the history of Dutch as Luther's Bible to the history of German, although appearing more than one hundred years later than Luther's (1522), it was not as innovative as that Bible. The influence of the Church, and thus of the language of the church, was still considerable. Now that a knowledge of reading was more wide-spread, one text that was read by all, regardless of standing and place of abode, was the State Translation of the Bible. This seventeenth century translation was to remain the authoritative Dutch Bible right up to the mid-20th century. In this sense it can be compared with the King James' version of the English Bible.

From what has been discussed so far, it can be seen why there was such a legacy to the southern dialects in the emergent ABN of the north, a legacy which was not contested until the literary revival of the late nineteenth century known as the Beweging van Tachtig and the linguistic consciousness that accompanied it. Nevertheless the Brabants contribution to ABN, especially in the written language, has survived and cannot be missed (see p. 103).

The seventeenth century still saw no Dutch-Dutch dictionary. For the time being, as in the sixteenth century, dictionaries were seen as a means of learning foreign languages, primarily French and Latin. Holland would have to wait fora long time before a dictionary would appear whose aim it was to record and enrich the mother tongue.

Grammars too had to date been aimed at an elite public, the authors and scholars of the day. Not till the nineteenth century would there be an attempt to prescribe grammatical forms in texts intended for the general public and the developing schools system. Such attempts would be based, however, on the ‘classical’ language of the writers of the Golden Age.

The influence of Dutch outside the Netherlands at the time of the Republic

The influence of the Dutch language was felt even beyond the borders of the Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the north of Germany, particularly in East Friesland, Dutch was the language used in the churches of the non-Lutheran protestant groups right into the eighteenth century. Through trade with the cities of the Hanseatic League, and thus contact with the Baltic, the Dutch language was well known in the mercantile centres of the region. Many Dutch-Low German3. words that have to do with sea-faring as well as with mercantile activity made their way at this time into High German, the Scandinavian languages and Russian - Czar Peter the Great himself spent some time in Zaandam learning the basics of Dutch ship-building.4. Nor did English escape influence from Dutch in the seventeenth century; nautical vocabulary was adopted into English from Dutch, e.g. boom, skipper, yacht. Leiden University attracted many a student from England but particularly co-religionists from Scotland. The bitter rivalry between the English and the Dutch that began under Cromwell from the mid-1600's also led to negative expressions in English incorporating the word ‘Dutch’ e.g. Dutch wife, Dutch courage, Double Dutch. The influence of Dutch on the sea-faring vocabulary of England was less in the eighteenth century when the English themselves began to replace the Dutch as the maritime nation of Europe.

The Dutch, unlike the Spanish, Portuguese, French and above all the English, seldom actually colonised the areas they actively traded in overseas. Their settlements in South America, West Africa, India, Taiwan and Japan were in most cases little more than trading posts, or factories as they were called. Thus the influence of the Dutch language in these areas was minimal and is difficult or impossible to trace nowadays. The only exceptions to this are South Africa, New Netherlands,

the Antilles and the East Indies. Even South Africa, the largest linguistic legacy left by Holland's overseas empire, became a colony against the express wishes and intentions of the East India Company that founded the Cape settlement. In New Amsterdam (now New York) and the adjacent mainland (then called New Netherlands), which were in Dutch hands from 1624-1664, a considerable number of colonists settled who remained when the English took control of the territory; names such as Roosevelt and Vanderbilt, descendents of the first Dutch colonists, have become legendary names in the U.S.A.; old maps of New Amsterdam show that present-day Wall Street, Broadway and Long Island, for example, are translations of the original Dutch names Wolstraat, Breede Weg and 't Lange Eiland; also the names Brooklyn, Harlem, Flushing and Staten Island preserve a lasting reminder of the origins of New York. The Dutch formed an elite in New York society right into the eighteenth century and Dutch was spoken by the majority of the population until the middle of that century. The town of Albany on the Hudson river, formerly called Beverwijk, has documents in Dutch in the municipal archives from as late as the late eighteenth century.

In the Dutch Antilles, Dutch was retained as the official language (see p. 3), whereas in Surinam (Dutch Guyana), which the Dutch got from the English in return for New York, it has been subsequently introduced and is now the official language although the original creole languages of the country are English-based (Sranantongo, Taki-Taki), the result of English activity in the area prior to the Dutch take-over in 1666; nowadays of course many Dutch words have made their way into these languages as they have into Papiamento, the creole of the Antilles.

When in 1612 the Danes arrived in the Virgin Islands (St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix), islands which they later gave to the U.S.A., they found a group of Dutch colonists, mainly from Zeeland and Flanders, and a native slave population speaking a pidgin Dutch now called Negerhollands. This language, now unfortunately virtually extinct, shares many of the simplifications that Dutch in South Africa also underwent.

Emigration of actual colonists to the East Indies belongs more to nineteenth century history when the Dutch first began to assume control of the entire Indonesian archipelago.

The considerable influence the Dutch language has had on Malay (Bahasa Indonesia) is thus also of later date, as is a great deal of the influence of Malay on Dutch (see p. 78), although undoubtedly Malay words for new concepts such as kapok, for instance, must have been known in Holland from the time of the first contacts.

Bibliography

VOOYS, C.G.N. de, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Taal.
Wolters-Noordhoff, Groningen, 1970.
Chapter 4 of this book deals with the seventeenth century.
KOELMANS, L. Inleiding tot het lezen van zeventiende-eeuws Nederlands.
Bohn, Scheltema & Holkema, Utrecht, 1978.
This is a good, practical little book which emphasises the differences in the pronunciation, spelling, grammar etc. of seventeenth century Dutch compared with the modern language. Intended for use by students.
HERMKENS, H.M. & KETTERIJ, C. van de, Grammaticale interpretatie van zeventiende-eeuwse teksten.
Wolters-Noordhoff, Groningen, 1980.
A good, practical guide to the reading of seventeenth century Dutch texts. Part one isa grammar and part two consists of passages for translation with a vocabulary. Van de Ketterij has produced something similar for Middle Dutch as well (see p. 97).
DIBBETS, G.R.W., ‘Grammaticale geschriften uit de zeventiende eeuw’. Chapter 3 in D.M. Bakker & G.R.W. Dibbets, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Taalkunde.
Malmberg, Den Bosch, 1977.
This deals in some detail with aspects of seventeenth century Dutch grammar and the writings of grammarians of the period.

 

General history books with background information on the Netherlands in the seventeenth century are recommended on p. 104. Chapter 5 of Meijer's Literature of the Low Countries, details of which are also given on p. 104. deals with the seventeenth century in some detail.


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