Chapter 3 The Dutch Situation - LOT publications

The Dutch Situation
the description of the Dutch vernacular in the Latin school grammar Exercitium
Puerorum, which notes as early as 1485 the syncretism of nominative and
accusative (Van der Wal 1988: 246) Generally, however, grammars up to the 19th
century were largely prescriptivistic and aimed at enrichment and improvement of
the native language on the basis of the classical languages Latin and Greek. In
particular, efforts targeted the inflectional morphology, especially case and gender,
equating rich inflections with a high state of development. Improvement efforts
involved the promotion of individual dialectal variants to standard forms, the
reconstruction of earlier forms, as well as the invention of new distinctions. 2
Inspiration was taken from the writings of highly valued authors from the past (see
section 3.1.3) and the more conservative Flemish and Brabantian dialects in the
south (Geerts 1966, but Van der Sijs 2004: 442). For the modern linguist, this means
that neither the historical grammars nor the preserved literary texts can be trusted to
provide realistic evidence about the colloquial language at a particular point in time. 3
Moreover, what is now the Dutch language area used to be a conglomerate of quite
heterogeneous spoken varieties whose documentation was not taken into
consideration by the research agenda until recently. In the last decades, a few
unbiasedly descriptive studies have appeared, e.g. by Van Leuvensteijn (1986, 1992,
1997, Van Leuvensteijn and Dekker 1990), comparing 16th century diaries from
Gouda in Holland and Brugge in West Flanders, as well as Hogenhout-Mulder and
Van Reenen (1988), a corpus study of 14th century Gronings (the dialect of
Groningen, now the northernmost province of the Netherlands). Generally, however,
there is no comprehensive account of the diachronic facts. We can only speculate up
to what period in time the three-gender system was alive in the various regional and
dialectal varieties or in the developing standard language, what form its
morphological exponents took and by which route it was replaced by the two-gender
system of today. Yet, a short sketch should be attempted. The following section will
give a rough account of what Middle Dutch gender morphology looked like,
focusing on those properties of the paradigms that were to pave the way from a
three- to a two-gender system.
2 Some of these inventions survive to this day. One of the most prominent - debated
among the educated public - is the distinction between hun (3rd person plural dative)
and hen (3rd person plural accusative). This artificial functional split of two dialectal
variants dates back to the grammar of Christiaen van Heule (1625) and it is still
propagated by style manuals, although only a minority of writers manages to adhere
to the rules consistently (Van der Sijs 2004: 478 ff, E-ANS § 5·2·5·2·3).
3 Revealing hints can be found in statements such as the following from the
grammar of Van Heule (1625) which gives a list of some 1500 nouns and their
genders, but concedes that “Dit onderscheid der geslachten en behouft in den rijm
altijt niet nagevolgt te worden, want om die oorzaeke zouden de Rijmers al te nouw
gebonden zijn” ('this difference of the genders does not always have to be followed
in rhyming, because this would constrain the rhymers too strictly’, 1625: 16).
Kollewijn rightly interprets this statement as evidence for the artificiality of the
gender distinctions expected in the written language (1916: 49).
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