Dutch. A linguistic history of Holland and Belgium

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15 The nineteenth century - birth of the modern age

By the time the Batavian Republic was declared in 1795, an immediate effect of revolutionary events in France, the Dutch nation was in possession ofa reasonably standard written form of its vernacular, based predominantly on the dialect of the former county of Holland; a standard form of the spoken language, however, was still far off and has, in some ways, still not been attained.

In 1797 the University of Leiden created, for the first time in history, a chair of Dutch. The foundation professor was the Reverend Matthijs Siegenbeek (1774-1854). The creation of such a post for authoritative reglementation of linguistic issues was important at this point in history because this was also the dawn of general education for the masses. Siegenbeek was commissioned to draw up proposals for a standard spelling of the Dutch language; his Verhandeling over de spelling der Nederduitse taal ter bevordering van eenparigheid in dezelve (Treatise on the spelling of the Dutch - lit. Low German - language for the furtherance of standardisation) appeared in 1804. Siegenbeek was of course a product of the eighteenth century and this was evident in his approach to his subject, but nevertheless he favoured a thorough revision of the principles of orthography, a philosophy current in Germany where the science of philology was being born at this time. However, Siegenbeek based his proposals on the suggestions which Kluit had made in 1777; for example, on the spelling of long vowels, he advocated that aa should not be written as ae and that a and u should not be doubled in open syllables but that e and ee, o and oo should alternate in open syllables in accordance with the etymology of the words concerned (see p. 40). This distinction in spelling, which was dependent on a distinction in pronunciation made in only a few dialects, found great opposition and was a constant handicap in the writing of Dutch until it was finally abolished in 1947.

Simultaneous with Siegenbeek's commission to draw up proposals for a standard orthography was the directive to the Reverend Petrus Weiland of Rotterdam to write a grammar of standard usage. This was duly completed in 1805 but was very eighteenth century in approach, still prescribing many antiquated forms.

One of Siegenbeek's and Weiland's greatest critics was the poet Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831) who, in advocating ‘spell as you speak’ and not the reverse as was often practised by teachers and ministers of religion at the time, represented the modern view i.e. that the sounds of a language are primary and the symbols with which one commits these sounds to paper are secondary; he also opposed the view that Latin should serve as a model for Dutch grammar. His was a nineteenth-twentieth century approach, theirs was an eighteenth century one. Bilderdijk too, however, had opponents as well as supporters - his poetic works were well known for their frequent borrowings from other languages and creation of new derivatives. In this too he set an example for later generations.

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The long period of excessive exposure to the influence of French, starting with the foundation of the Batavian Republic, a French inspired creation, and culminating in Napoleon's incorporation of Holland into his empire, sparked off numerous reactions to the ‘bastardisation’ of the Dutch language which had occurred in the period 1795-1813.

The nineteenth century also saw an ever increasing influence of German on the vocabulary of Dutch due to the important role Germany was playing in various scientific fields at the time. Many of these German loan words, now dressed in Dutch garb, have become part and parcel of Dutch and are no longer recognised as German in origin (see p. 76). The growing influence of German also had its critics. Siegenbeek, for instance, compiled a Lijst van woorden en uitdrukkingen niet het Nederlands taaleigen strijdende (List of words and expressions incompatible with Dutch idiom) in which he concentrated on loans from German.

In the nineteenth century an enormous amount of new vocabulary made its way into the language, either in the form of loan words or new compounds of indigenous words, to cover the wide range of new social, political and scientific developments - the French revolution had sparked off irreversible changes in the social and political organisation of Europe and the industrial revolution had also dawned bringing about tremendous advances in communications and manufacturing.

The brief period of unification with Belgium under King William I and that king's valiant efforts to promote the Dutch language are discussed on p. 25.

By the mid-nineteenth century, as a reaction to romanticism, a literary movement that had favoured the revival of archaisms, came the period of realism. One of the consequences of this development was the frequent attempt to record natural speech, and even dialect, in novels which gives some insight into the spoken language of the day. How great the gap was at various times in history between what people actually spoke and what was written, and thus preserved, is usually impossible to know, but the realistic literature of the nineteenth century goes some way towards enlightening us on this point. One example of the sort of difference that still existed between written and spoken Dutch was the use of gij/u and jij/jou respectively. Only after 1840 did the written language begin to move closer to the spoken language, thanks to the efforts of popular authors such as Nicolaas Beets, alias Hildebrand (1814-1903). He, for instance, maintained of the language used in his famous Camera Obscura that he had stripped it of its ‘Sunday dress’. However, the greatest milestone in this regard was the novel Max Havelaar (1860) by Eduard Douwes Dekker, alias Multatuli (1820-1887).

The truly scientific study of Dutch commenced at this time too. The first chairs of Dutch at the universities of Leiden, Utrecht and Groningen, manned by products of eighteenth century scholarship as they were, were concerned more with issues of written expression and style than with language history. That science did not develop until the early nineteenth century, and even then it first saw the light of day in Germany. The first linguistic periodicals were soon founded, inviting contributions on all aspects of the Dutch language, including dialects. In fact, right from the beginning there was great interest shown in Holland for dialectology.

Two scholars who were involved in the serious study of Dutch from the birth of the new science were Matthias de Vries (1802-1892) and Lammert Allard te Winkel (1806-1868). The former, professor of Dutch in Leiden from 1853, is regarded as

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the father of the scientific study of Dutch. He had made a thorough study of Middle Dutch and was to devote his life to the compilation of an authoritative Dutch dictionary, something the nation had never really had.^1. He harboured a respect for both the classical written language of the past and the living language as it was spoken by his contemporaries.

In 1851 De Vries published his Ontwerp van een Nederlandsch woordenboek. Te Winkel joined him in helping to realise this dream, but first a standard spelling had to be agreed upon and the contributions these two scholars made in this arena are discussed on p. 40. The first, extremely detailed section of the Nederlandsch Woordenboek finally appeared in 1864 but not till 1882 did the first volume of this monumental work appear. De Vries took as the starting point of this dictionary, which he saw as a sort of museum of the Dutch language, the year 1637, the date of the State Translation of the Bible. After his death his work was continued by others who then limited the scope of the dictionary somewhat. Work on it continues to the present day and meanwhile supplements have also appeared - the language has inevitably changed, even drastically in some ways, since the 1860's. In addition, Dutch spelling has since been reformed but all new sections of the dictionary published today must, by necessity, be printed in the spelling used by De Vries.

De Vries' attitudes to grammatical inflection, still very conservative, were hotly opposed by the oriëntalist Taco Roorda. The ruling opinion, as in the previous century, was still that simplification of the inflectional system would result in impoverishment of the language. Roorda, like so many others before him, was ahead of his time in what he advocated.

Roorda's ideas on written expression were to become the norm in the 1880's when the literary movement known as the Beweging van Tachtig began. The writers who constituted this movement, the birth of the modern Dutch literary tradition, broke radically with past conventions in linguistic issues. Realism, and now also naturalism, demanded of the nineteenth century novelists an absolutely natural rendition of the normal spoken word in writing, whatever the subject matter. Thus, from this time dates written Dutch more or less as we know it today, although a lapse back into the written style of former times is still commonly found in letters, legal documents and government proclamations.

1. One previous attempt at compilation of a comprehensive Dutch dictionary deserves mention here, Petrus Weiland's Taalkundig Woordenboek (1799-1811), but this work relied heavily on the corpus of older dictionaries.

Bibliography

VOOYS, C.G.N. de, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Taal. Wolters-Noordhoff, Groningen, 1970. Chapters 6-10 deal with various aspects of the history of Dutch in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the differing or parallel developments and attitudes in Holland and Belgium.

BAKKER, D.M. ‘De grammatica in de negentiende eeuw’. Chapter 5 in D.M. Bakker & G.R.W. Dibbets, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Taalkunde. Malmberg, Den Bosch, 1977. Quite a detailed account of nineteenth century linguists' attitudes to Dutch.