Fonetiek en verlichting

De Redeneringh over de talen van Jan Trioen (1692)

[p. 33]

Summary

During the first reception of the more empiristic and experimental ideas and methods of the Early Enlightenment, the Haarlem apothecary Jan Trioen (1657-1721) read his Redeneringh over de talen in the local scientific society, the Collegium Physicum Harlemense. The Swiss phonetician Johann Conrad Amman (1669-1724), who published an account of the teachings he gave to the deaf and mute daughter of a wealthy Haarlem merchant in Surdus loquens (1692), evidently influenced Trioen's phonetics.

Inspired by Nicolas Malebranche's (1638-1715) epistemology Trioen analysed the Humanistic historiography of P.C. Hooft (1581-1647). This study provided him with the theoretical framework in which Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont's (1614-1699) theory of the alphabetum naturae (Van Helmont 1667), which also formed the theoretic background of Amman's phonetics, could develop into the instrument of sound analysis that grew out of it in Lambert ten Kate's (1674-1731) ‘critique spelling’ (Ten Kate 1723 I:115). Besides this, there seems to be evidence, that Trioen and the young Amsterdam anabaptist Ten Kate have met regularly, shortly before Ten Kate wrote his first linguistic treatise, the Klankkunde (1699).