Netherlandic language research

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Chapter Nine
Netherlandic and Foreign Languages

Ever since the earliest written tradition, and continuing up to our days, Netherlandic has shown the very strong influence of French. The standard work on this influence is that by J.J. Salverda de Grave, De Franse woorden in het Nederlands (Amsterdam, 1906), to which J.J.B. Elzinga made an alphabetical word index (Amsterdam, 1920). Salverda de Grave classifies the loanwords according to the semantic and social spheres they belong to, thus giving a picture of the way in which French culture and education have influenced Netherlandic. As for the purely grammatical side, he chiefly restricts himself to the phonology and morphology of the words borrowed, since he is, somewhat rashly, of the opinion that syntactical influence by a foreign language is impossible or at any rate negligible. In an earlier publication, Essai sur quelques groupes de mots empruntés par le néerlandais au latin écrit (Amsterdam, 1900), Salverda had discussed the formal criteria for distinguishing Latin loanwords from French ones. In a more concise and popular form he dealt with L'influence de la langue française en Hollande d'après les mots empruntés (Paris, 1913), an elaboration of a series of lectures he gave in the Université de Paris. Salverda de Grave also devoted a special study to Franse woorden uit de achttiende en negentiende eeuw, N.Tg. XXVIII, 289 ff, XXIX, 295 ff, XXX, 149 ff, in which he paid special attention to the semantic groups and the social circles in which French loanwords entered Netherlandic in the 18th and 19th century.

In Salverda's works, Netherlandic, as far as the later centuries are concerned, is almost exclusively Northern Netherlandic. The more complicated situation in Flemish Belgium, with French dominant among the upper classes, even now accentuates the influence of French on Netherlandic. In the first part of Chapter VIII we mentioned some publications whose authors made their stand against gallicisms in Southern Netherlandic.

J.W. Muller in his article Over ware en schijnbare gallicismen in het Middelnederlandsch, N.Tg. XIV, 1 ff and 65 ff, which we mentioned in Chapter IV, pays attention to syntactical influences also, as

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Salverda de Grave had not. Emil Oehmann wrote on Die mittelniederländische Lehnprägung nach altfranzösischem Vorbild in the Finnish periodical Neophilologische Mitteilungen 1953, 144 ff, and in the Swedish Studia Neophilologica XXIX, 3 ff.

J.J.B. Elzinga composed a study Les mots français et les gallicismes dans le Hollandsche Spectator de Justus van Effen (Leyden, 1923): Justus van Effen, in his periodical De Hollandsche Spectator 1731-35, gave specimens of spoken language in different social circles, especially the higher ones. In the last decades of the 18th century falls the activity of the novelists Mrs. Betje Wolff and Miss Aagje Deken, who in their novels, written in epistolary form, convey a good idea of the natural, educated language of their day. The French words in their letters were the subject of an article by C.G.N. de Vooys in Mélanges Salverda de Grave (Groningen-The Hague-Batavia, 1933), 365 ff. A study of wider scope is the doctoral thesis by H.J. Vieu-Kuik, Het gebruik van Franse woorden door Wolff en Deken, where loanwords are considered as signposts in social history. The first part (Arnhem, 1951) deals with ‘words referring to man in the relation to his fellow-men’, the second (Arnhem, n.d. [1957]) with ‘words defining man in his religious, intellectual and cultural development’.

C.B. van Haeringen, in Herverfransing (Amsterdam, 1957), shows the continuing influence of French, manifesting itself in the phonetic ‘re-French-ification’ of words that had been more or less adapted to the Netherlandic sound system.

The influence of German on Netherlandic is to be perceived, not so much in words directly borrowed from German and recognizable as ‘foreign’, as in peculiarities of word formation and semantic nuance where Netherlandic follows or imitates German in a way contrary to its own idiom, the so-called germanisms. As the two languages are so closely related, criteria for germanisms are often doubtful, and throughout the campaign that has been conducted since the beginning of the 19th century against the corruption of our language by these impurities, an exaggerated fear of imitation has often manifested itself. Certain types of word formation and derivation, usual in Netherlandic as well as in German, were sometimes rejected because German had employed them first. Hypersensitivity on this point was the cause of a large number of publications being written by all sorts of people, in period-

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icals and newspapers. Most of these publications we shall have to leave out of consideration. A lucid survey of the varying opinions held in the 19th and 20th centuries is to be found in C.G.N. de Vooys' Duitse invloed op de Nederlandse woordvoorraad (Amsterdam, 1946), in the 5th chapter; the preceding chapters trace the German influence in earlier periods. A preparatory study was the lecture which de Vooys delivered in the Amsterdam Academy of Sciences, Nedersaksische en Hoogduitse invloeden op de Nederlandse woordvoorraad (Amsterdam, 1936). De Vooys' attitude towards germanisms is moderate and well thought-out, even in his earlier publication Hoe zijn germanismen te beschouwen?, which he wrote under the pseudonym K. Veenenbos for the N.Tg. III, 190 ff and 225 ff, and which was reprinted under his own name, with the title Duitse invloed op het Nederlands, in Verz. Taalk. Opst. II, 39 ff.

A. Moortgat's Germanismen in het Nederlandsch (Ghent, 1925) was a prize-winning essay; the prize had been offered for a counterpart to W. de Vreese's Gallicismen in het Zuidnederlandsch, the period of investigation being restricted to that after 1880. The book deals chiefly with Southern Netherlandic.

An inquiry into the influence of German on professional language was made by J. Leest in his doctoral thesis Duitsche invloed op het Nederlandsch der Protestantsche theologen sedert het begin der 19e eeuw (Groningen-The Hague, 1929). G. Kloeke, in Ts. LXXV, 81 ff, points out transpositions of German words into Netherlandic through bible translations.

On the attitude to be taken by Netherlandic towards foreign influence in general, the studies by C.G.N. de Vooys, Purisme (Verz. Taalk. Opst. II, 3 ff) and by G. Royen, Ongaaf Nederlands (‘Unsound Netherlandic’; 3rd edition, Amsterdam, 1946) are of importance. Many original remarks on this subject are to be found in an essay by W. de Vries, Het oneigene, a private publication, undated (1925).

We ought to mention here, for the sake of balance, the Berlin thesis by Gerd Labroisse, Zum Charakter der niederländischen und deutschen Hochsprache (1956). This book, called a Studie zur Eigenständigkeit des Niederländischen by the author, was never printed, but appeared in a small number of stencilled copies. For a survey of its contents see C.B. van Haeringen, N.Tg. L, 96 ff.

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The influence of English is first observable in the 18th century, it increases steadily in the 19th century, and has become stronger than ever before since 1945. The first study that deserves mentioning in this connection is that by W. de Hoog, Studiën over de Nederlandsche en Engelsche Taal en Letterkunde en haar wederzijdschen invloed (2 vols; 2nd edition, Dordrecht, 1909), the first part of which is devoted to the influence of English on Netherlandic. This work, with its excellent collection of material, but on the whole rather unsystematic, was taken as a basis by C.G.N. de Vooys for his article Hoe zijn anglicismen te beschouwen? in N.Tg. VIII, 124 ff, 161 ff, 225 ff, reprinted in his Verz. Taalk. Opst. II, 71 ff under the title Engelse invloed op het Nederlands. In the post-war volumes of the N.Tg., de Vooys has regularly published notes on recent English loans and the snobbery sometimes associated with their use. The material for these articles, together with that for earlier studies, was incorporated in de Vooys' larger treatise Engelse invloed op de Nederlandse woordvoorraad (Amsterdam, 1951).

Der englische Einfluss auf das Niederländische, a Leipzig doctoral thesis by G. Worgt, has never appeared in print. C.G.N. de Vooys discussed it in N.Tg. XLIX, 3 ff, giving suggestions as to how this important work might be published.

The Oudengelse invloeden in het Nederlands assumed by Heeroma, Ts. LXX, 257 ff, are for the greater part debatable.

C.B. van Haeringen's Nederlands tussen Duits en Engels (The Hague, n.d. [1956]) is intended for a wider public, and compares the development and present-day structure of the three languages.

De Spaanse woorden in het Nederlands is the title of an essay which C.F.A. van Dam wrote for the Bundel opstellen van oud-leerlingen, aangeboden aan Prof. Dr. C.G.N. de Vooys (Groningen-Batavia, 1940), 86 ff. Emil Oehmann wrote Ueber den italienischen Einfluss auf das Niederländische for V.M.V.A. 1955, 131 ff. De invloed van het Nederlands op het Deens was traced by L.L. Hammerich in V.M.V.A. 1948, 105 ff.

In contrast to the very strong influence Netherlandic has undergone in the past, and is still undergoing, from the great languages of the world, the influence of Netherlandic on other languages is only slight. It is, for a great part, restricted to maritime terms, owing to

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the fact that in the 17th and 18th centuries the merchant navy of Holland dominated the seas. Remarkably numerous are maritime loanwords from Netherlandic, in this case Hollandic, in Russian, as was shown by R. van der Meulen in De Hollandsche Zee- en Scheepstermen in het Russisch (Amsterdam, 1909). Now, fifty years later, he has provided a supplement, Nederlandse Woorden in het Russisch (Amsterdam, 1959), which is not restricted to nautical terms alone. Other Netherlandic influences on Russian were discussed by van der Meulen in his articles Hollando-Russica for Ts. XXVIII, 206 ff and XXIX, 249 ff.

M. Valkhoff wrote an Étude sur les mots français d'origine néerlandaise (Amersfoort, 1931), and J.F. Bense compiled a Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary (The Hague, 1939). In both works, especially the latter, the limits of linguistic influence are drawn rather broadly.

We are promised a work on Netherlandic words in Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese by M. Valkhoff and B.E. Vidos. Research prospects and new facts were given in the inaugural address of B.E. Vidos, Nieuwe onderzoekingen over Nederlandsche woorden in Romaansche talen (Nimeguen-Utrecht, 1947). Earlier, Valkhoff, in a book De Expansie van het Nederlands (² Brussels, 1943), destined for a wider reading public, had devoted a chapter to Het Nederlands in de Romaanse talen. An article on Netherlandic words in Spanish is that by Valkhoff in Neophilol. XXXV, 65 ff. The article by W. Mitzka, Das Niederländische in Deutschland, for Niederdeutsche Studien, Festschrift C. Borchling (Neumünster in Holstein, 1932), 207 ff, inspired J.W. Muller to write on Het Nederlandsch in Duitschland for N.Tg. XXVII, 77 ff, which he followed up with a monograph, De uitbreiding van het Nederlandsch taalgebied, vooral in de zeventiende eeuw (The Hague, 1939), in which he outlined the position of Netherlandic as a means of spoken and written communication especially across the eastern border of the Netherlands.

The surviving traces of Netherlandic in Brandenburg, where it was introduced by colonists, were discussed by H. Teuchert in Niederfränkisches Sprachgut in der Mark Brandenburg for the Zeitschrift für deutsche Mundarten XVIII, 174 ff, and more extensively in his book Die Sprachreste der niederländischen Siedlungen des 12. Jahrhunderts (Neumünster, 1944).

An interesting special field of study is the mutual influence of

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Flemish and Walloon dialects on both sides of the Belgian language boundary. Several Flemish scholars have occupied themselves with this penetration of Flemish into Walloon and vice versa. L. Grootaers discussed Quelques emprunts entre patois flamands et wallons in Leuv. Bijdr. XVI, 43 ff; Woordmigratie over de Vlaams-Waalse taalgrens in Handelingen van het 17e Nederl. Philologencongres (Groningen, 1937), 60 ff; J. Grauls several times made Een uitstapje naar het Walenland, in Hand. Top. Dial. VI, VII, VIII, IX and X. An alphabetical index to Grauls' ‘trips’ was made by J. Jaquet in Hand. Top. Dial. XII, 119 ff. J. Leenen pointed out the Franse taaluitzetting over Limburg in Hand. Top. Dial. XII, 118 ff. A. van Doorne studied De Franse woorden in het dialect van Wingene, for Hand. Top. Dial. XIII, 297 ff. R. Verdeyen put the question Comment connaître les éléments flamands dans les dialects wallons? at the 19th session of the ‘Fédération archéologique et historique de Belgique’, and his lecture was published in the report of that session (Liege, 1932), it also appeared as a separate offprint (Liege, 1934).

A man who has done much for the study of the mutual Flemish-Walloon infiltration is the Walloon linguist Jean Haust, to whom we are indebted for the Dictionnaire Liégeois (Liege, 1933) and the Dictionnaire français-liégeois (Liege, 1948; prepared for the press by Elisée Legros). To the Mélanges de linguistique offerts à M. Jean Haust (Mélanges Haust, Liege, 1939) several Flemish linguists contributed, thus J. Gessler, Notes de lexicologie comparée (limbourgeoise et liégoise); L. Grootaers, À propos des noms wallons du ‘fruit tapé’; R. Verdeyen, De neppe à nozé et nifeter.

The activities of Haust and other Walloon scholars will not be further reviewed here. Much about this subject is to be found in the bibliography which the North Netherlandic linguist L. Geschiere added to his comprehensive work Éléments néerlandais du wallon liégeois (Amsterdam, 1950). Netherlandic elements in the Walloon dialect of Liege had earlier been discussed by M. Valkhoff in his Notes étymologiques for Neophilol. XXI, 198 ff. In it, Valkhoff deals with the pejorative prefix ca- and its variants, which before him had been discussed by J.J. Salverda de Grave in his study Sur un préfixe français ‘réel’ (Amsterdam, 1926). Another contribution by Valkhoff to the study of the influence of Netherlandic on French, especially Walloon and Northern French, is Sur un suffixe flamand en français, en picard et en wallon, in Neophilol. XIX, 243 ff. The

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question of syntactic influence is discussed by the same author in his article Waals en Germaans for Leuv. Bijdr. XXVIII, 1 ff. The political and practical consequences of the language boundary in Belgium were reviewed by Valkhoff in his inaugural address Geschiedenis en actualiteit van de Frans-Nederlandse taalgrens (Amsterdam, 1950). An earlier treatise on Ontstaan en betekenis van de Frans-Nederlandse taalgrens forms Ch. II of Valkhoff's above-mentioned book De Expansie van het Nederlands.

The influence of Malay and other Indonesian languages on Netherlandic has been little studied since F. Prick van Wely wrote Neerland's taal in 't verre Oosten (Semarang-Surabaia, 1906), laying special stress on the native substratum and its effect on Netherlandic as spoken by Indonesians. Indonesian words in European Netherlandic are numerous enough to have led van der Meer, in his Historische Grammatik (cf. Ch. II B), to devote some paragraphs to ‘die Laute der indischen Wörter’. Since Indonesia became independent, however, the mutual influence of Netherlandic and Indonesian has gradually diminished, and will probably disappear completely in future. So the interesting article by K. Heeroma in N.Tg. L, 96 ff, on the position of Netherlandic in Indonesia during the first few years after the separation, is likely to have been the last on this subject. Likewise, M.C. van den Toorn's description of De taal van de Indische Nederlanders in N.Tg. L, 218 ff, will shortly be a historical document.

We are fairly well informed about the peculiar creolization of Netherlandic in the West Indian archipelago. There is an essay by D.C. Hesseling, Het Negerhollands der Deense Antillen (Leyden, 1905); H. Schuchardt wrote an article Zum Negerholländischen von St. Thomas for Ts. XXXIII, 123 ff, and J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong prepared an Academy-paper Het Negerhollands van St. Thomas en St. Jan (Amsterdam, 1924).

The linguistic situation in Surinam has recently been investigated by W. Gs. Hellinga and W. Pée. One result of their inquiries, Pée's De klanken van het Neger-Engels (published in Taal en Tongval III, 180 ff), has already appeared. The linguistic structure of Taki-Taki (Negro-English) had been treated earlier, by R.A. Hall, in the periodical Language XXIV, 92 ff. Hellinga's book Language Problems in Surinam (Amsterdam, 1955), with many diagrams and statistical data, has the teaching of Netherlandic as its main subject.

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Hellinga's pupil J.J. Voskuil investigated the special difficulties met with in Het Nederlands van Hindoestaanse kinderen in Suriname (Amsterdam, 1956). J. Voorhoeve, another of Hellinga's pupils, composed Voorstudies tot een beschrijving van het Sranan Tongo (Negro-English of Surinam) (Amsterdam, 1953), while L.L.E. Rens dealt with The Historical and Social Background of Surinam's Negro-English (Amsterdam, 1953).

A description of the Papiamento of the island of Curaçao, mentioned with much appreciation by W. Gs. Hellinga in Taal en Tongval III, 136 ff, is R. Lenz' El Papiamento. La lengua criolla de Curazao (Santiago de Chile, 1926-28). An article in Spanish on the origin and development of Papiamento was written by H.L.A. van Wijk for Neophilol. XLII, 169 ff.

That most interesting form of simplified Netherlandic, the Afrikaans of South Africa, has in this century developed into an independent language, used for all cultural, literary and practical purposes. Mention will be made here of only a few works, dealing with the origin and causes of the conversion of Netherlandic into Afrikaans. Afrikaans itself will not be discussed, it has been described in many good handbooks, and is the subject of systematic study, on an increasingly large scale, in the Union of South Africa.

The theory of D.C. Hesseling, set forth in Het Afrikaans (Leyden, 1899; 2nd edition, revised and brought up to date, Leyden, 1923), was that the contact with Malay-Portuguese, the lingua franca in African ports, was responsible for the curious and remarkably rapid transformation of Netherlandic at the Cape. Objections to Hesseling's hypothesis were made by E. Kruisinga in Taal en Letteren XVI, 417 ff, and later on by others, especially South African scholars. D.B. Bosman, in Oor die ontstaan van Afrikaans (Amsterdam, 1923; 2nd, slightly altered edition Amsterdam, 1928), partly considers the change as a degeneration or corruption of Netherlandic as it was spoken by the numerous strangers of different nationalities, and partly assumes a spontaneous development. The latter possibility especially is stressed by S.P.E. Boshoff in Volk en taal van Suid-Afrika (Pretoria-Cape Town, 1921). W. Preusler, in Taal en Leven VI, 20 ff, tackles Das Problem des Afrikaans from a point of view similar to that of Bosman and Kruisinga.

The most recent work on Afrikaans, G.G. Kloeke's Herkomst en

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groei van het Afrikaans (Leyden, 1950), does not pay much attention to grammatical changes, but tries to demonstrate that the Southern Hollandic dialect was the basis of Afrikaans, a hypothesis that cannot be regarded as duly proved. Objections were raised by J. du P. Scholtz in Oor die herkoms van Afrikaans (Cape Town, 1950; a separate issue of a long review in the South African periodical Die Huisgenoot), and by E. Blancquaert in Bij Prof. Kloeke's ‘Herkomst en groei van het Afrikaans’, written for Tijdschrift voor Levende Talen XVII, 10 ff. J.L. Pauwels, too, expressed his doubts as to the validity of Kloeke's conclusions, in Leuv. Bijdr. XLI. But whatever our opinion about his conclusions, Kloeke's book should be thankfully welcomed for its detailed information on Southern Hollandic, a dialect hitherto little explored on account of its complicated situation among the great centres of culture.

The question of loans from Netherlandic to Afrikaans, a very intricate subject in view of the close kinship of the two languages, was touched on very expertly by J. du P. Scholtz in his inaugural address Nederlandse invloed op die Afrikaanse woordeskat (Cape Town-London-New York, 1951). The same author dealt with two very important respects in which the grammatical structure of Afrikaans has been simplified: the verbal system, in Tydskrif vir Wetenskap en Kuns XVIII (1958), 61 ff, and the disappearance of the nominal two-class system, ibid., 160 ff.

S.A. Louw, Dialekvermenging en taalontwikkeling, Proewe van Afrikaanse taalgeografie (Amsterdam, 1948), tackles the development of Afrikaans from the standpoint of dialect geography. He comes to no definite conclusions about the origin of Afrikaans, but clearly attributes great influence to the mixing of many dialects at the Cape.

J.L. Pauwels has added an interesting appendix to his description of Het Dialect van Aarschot en omstreken (Tongres, 1958), to be mentioned in Ch. X, entitled De expletieve ontkenning nie(t) aan het einde van de zin in het Zuidnederlands en het Afrikaans. In it, he puts forward, rather convincingly, the theory that the double negation nie...nie, a much discussed, typical feature of Afrikaans, did not originate in South Africa, but already existed in the European Netherlandic of the colonists.