Chapter 3 The Dutch Situation - LOT publications

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The Dutch Situation their gender. Gender affiliation was established on the basis of the usage by the honoured writers Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (1581-1647) and Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679). 6 This list was reprinted and updated by various other scholars (see Rutten 2006 for the history of the word list). As time proceeded and the written and the spoken gender system drifted further apart, the matter moved from a grammatical to an orthographic issue and was mainly discussed in the context of spelling reforms. Notorious for its gender and case normativity is the orthography by De Vries en Te Winkel (1863) and their Woordenlijst voor de spelling der Nederlandsche taal (1866), the forerunner of what is now Het Groene Boekje ‘the green booklet’. Issued by the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union) under the name of “Woordenlijst Nederlandse Taal”, this book represents the official spelling dictionary, and is probably the most widely consulted source on grammatical gender. The last of the inflectional suffixes on determiners and adjectives, the masculine -n, was declared optional by the orthography of Marchant (1947) and later by the Groene Boekje of 1954, “waarna er nooit meer iets van is vernomen” (“whereupon nothing more was heard of it”, Van der Sijs 2004: 445, author’s translation). The Dutch authorities finally embraced the system that had prevailed in the spoken standard language all along. Adjectives and articles now take the forms as in (3), both in the nominative and the oblique case (no case distinctions productively exist in present day Dutch outside the paradigms of the personal pronouns, except for a genitive-s which is restricted to proper names and terms of address such as vader ‘father’). 7 (3) de oud-e man een oud-e man DEF.C old-C/N man(C) an old-C man(C) de jong-e vrouw een jong-e vrouw DEF.C young-C/N woman(C) a young-C woman(C) het klein-e kind een klein kind DEF.N small-N child(N) a small.N child(N) As regards adnominal elements, Dutch no longer distinguishes masculine and feminine gender. From a linguistic point of view, this means that the two genders have merged into one. The group that combines the original masculines and 6 Unfortunately, even the role models for gender usage proved to be unreliable. Vondel, born to Brabantian parents in German Cologne, differed quite often in his gender choice from Hooft, who was born and raised in Amsterdam. Besides, neither of the authors was fully consistent in his own work (see Kollewijn 1916 for comparison and critical discussion). 7 Unproductive remnants of inflected forms are preserved in fixed expressions such as de tand des tijds ‘time's tooth’, ter wereld ‘of/in(to) the world’, in koelen bloede ‘in cold blood’. 38
39 Chapter 3 feminines is referred to as common, uter, non-neuter or de-gender (after the definite article), while the rest of the nouns are neuter or het-words (again, after the definite article). Yet, dictionaries are hesitant to acknowledge the new gender. This has to do with the fact that the distinction between masculine and feminine is still formally marked on the personal pronouns. These pronouns, therefore, are expected to uphold the traditional split. This view is supported by the linguistic behaviour of two groups of language users. The first consists of speakers of southern Dutch or Flemish dialects. In these dialects, many nouns are pronominalized as feminines, ranging from underived native words such as bank ‘bench, bank’ or broek ‘(pair of) trousers’ to complex loanwords such as organisatie ‘organization’. Feminine pronouns for the former group are a typical trait of southern dialects; northern Dutch speakers use masculine pronouns instead. The following reported dialogue illustrates the difference between north and south. A colleague jokingly exploits the difference between himself (A, from the north) and his wife (B, a southern dialect speaker) in the pronominalization of the noun broek ‘trousers’. Note that the feminine pronoun (reduced form) is syncretic with the third person plural pronoun. (4) A: Heb je mijn broek gewassen? have you my trousers.SG(C) washed ‘Did you wash my trousers?’ B: Ja, ik heb ze gewassen. yes I have 3.F/3PL washed ‘Yes, I washed it/them’ A: Oh, heb je meerdere broeken gewassen? oh have you several trousers.PL washed ‘Oh so you’ve washed several pairs of trousers?’ B: Nee, alleen de jouwe. no only DEM.C yours ‘No, only yours’ A: Dus je hebt ‘m gewassen? so you have 3.M washed ‘So you’ve washed them?’ B: Ja, ik zeg toch, ik heb ze gewassen. yes I say AFF I have 3.F washed ‘Yes, as I said, I washed them.’ The southern speakers’ preference for feminine pronouns with broek ‘trousers’ is a direct consequence of the fact that southern varieties still mark masculine and
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