Dutch. A linguistic history of Holland and Belgium

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14 The eighteenth century - a period of stagnation

The eighteenth century, a century of general stagnation in the history of Holland, saw a much more conscious effort to standardise the language than had ever been the case before, and the Dutch of the classical writers of the seventeenth century, particularly that of Hooft and Vondel, was greatly revered. A similar situation existed in France at the time too where the language of Corneille and Racine enjoyed great respect. This century was to see a considerable number of publications on the subject of language reglementation. Only the most important are dealt with here.

Throughout the eighteenth century Europe was to witness the dominance of French language, letters and manners - the Dutch refer to it as the pruikentijd (the era of wigs). This was to have an inevitable effect on the frequency of gallicisms in Dutch, particularly in the language of the upper classes. Many of the writings of the period show an exaggerated use of French vocabulary. There is also ample evidence that the feeling for gender and case was being kept alive only artificially - there are, for instance, gross inconsistencies in the application of the accusative and dative n endings to articles and adjectives.

The most important Dutch grammarian of the century was the Amsterdammer Balthasar Huydecoper (1695-1778). He was the first to make a thorough study of Middle Dutch; he believed that one should look to the past to find guidance for the future in linguistic issues. His book, Proeve van Taal- en Dicht-kunde (1730), was regarded as a standard work throughout the century. Huydecoper took as his basis the language of Vondel, but he proceeded to point out where Vondel's grammar had digressed from the rules. The language of one of Holland's greatest seventeenth century authors, tidied up to fit in with the traditional categories of grammar, however artificial and obsolete these may have been by the eighteenth century, was considered an ideal worthy of imitation. At least it provided the people of the time with a basis for a standard written form of the Dutch language. Huydecoper was not the only grammarian to take this approach; David van Hoogstraten (1700) and Arnold Moonen (1706) had had the same idea.

Throughout the nineteenth century, as in the century before, Latin still enjoyed a privileged position in scholarly and legal circles. To a considerable degree it was the knowledge of Latin (and Greek) and the admiration for the standardised formal grammar of that language that lay behind the desire to impose rigid grammatical rules on the vernacular, although they were often at odds with the natural spoken language of the day. It was considered a means of displaying scholarship.

After Huydecoper, the other great grammarian of this period was Lambert ten Kate (1674-1731) who was ahead of his time in so many ways; for example, his study of phonetics, Klankkunde (1699), was not typical of the eighteenth century.

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He saw beyond spelling, realising that it is but an arbitrary convention for rendering the sounds of a language in writing and that these sounds are themselves worthy of scientific analysis. It was also Ten Kate who first studied the similarities between Gothic and Dutch (1710) and in so doing pre-empted the scientific study of the history of Dutch in its Germanic context that was to blossom in the nineteenth century. In his opposition to the prescription of archaic grammatical rules that bore little relation to everyday speech, he was also a radical; he maintained that cultivated speech should be a suitable medium for writing. His main work was the momentous 1500-paged Aanleiding tol de kennisse van het verhevene deel der Nederduitse sprake (1723). This is one of the most important works ever written on the Dutch language.

Of Ten Kate and Huydecoper, the former was more important from the point of view of modern scholarship, although he too looked back to Dutch as it had been written in former times when questions of doubt arose, and even he did not advocate complete abolition of grammatical inflection. But in the eighteenth century it was Huydecoper who enjoyed the greater reputation.

Adriaan Kluit (1735-1807), an historian from Leiden, was a scholar in the tradition of Huydecoper whose 1777 treatise, which attempted to standardise spelling and determine genders for Dutch nouns, was to be taken by Professor Siegenbeek early in the next century as the basis for the so-called Spelling Siegenbeek which was to be regarded as the official spelling of Dutch until it too was revised by De Vries and Te Winkel in the 1850's.

Towards the end of the century, by which time Europe was in the grip of the Enlightenment, there was an ever increasing repudiation of the stiff, unnatural mode of written expression that had burdened the language to date. Although some archaic forms would be maintained in the written language for a long time to come - the last were only abolished once and for all in 1947 - a conscious attempt to bring the written and spoken languages closer together in favour of the latter, had begun by this time and was to continue. Also by this time, the influence of German and English philosophy and literature, and thus ultimately the borrowing of words from those languages, had begun and was soon to rival and finally overtake the influence of French. This was a period of tremendous philosophical and political upheaval in Europe, culminating in the American and French revolutions; such drastic changes in society inevitably brought new vocabulary with them to all the languages of Europe.

Bibliography

VOOYS, C.G.N. de, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Taal. Wolters-Noordhoff, Groningen, 1970. Chapter 5 deals with the eighteenth century.

KNOL, J. ‘De Nederlandse taalkunde in de achttiende eeuw’. Chapter 4 in D.M. Bakker & G.R.W. Dibbets Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Taalkunde. Malmberg, Den Bosch, 1977. A good account of eighteenth century attitudes to the Dutch language.