History of Dutch Orthography - Dutch Spelling in The Middle Ages

Dutch Spelling in The Middle Ages

The Dutch spoken between 1150 and 1500 is referred to as Middle Dutch. During this period there was no standardization of grammar. Authors generally wrote in their own dialects. Very often it is possible to tell from the language whether a text comes from Limburg, Brabant, or Holland. There was a lot of variation in the spelling. Words were often written as they were pronounced: lant (land), hi vint (he finds). The sound determined the spelling, irrespective of the basic word. This is no longer the case with modern Dutch where land, has a voiceless ‘d’, but is written thus because the infinitive is landen, and hij vindt (he finds) has dt as it is 3rd person singular, thus stem (vind) +t .

From the very start of its written history, Dutch used the Latin alphabet. At first there were 23 letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, v, x, y, z. It was not until later that the j, u, and w were added.

A problem with the Latin alphabet was that it was not easy to make a distinction between long and short vowels (a - aa). Various solutions were found. At the beginning of the 13th century the word jaar (year) was spelt jar but other variants soon appeared: jaer and jair and later jaar or even yaer and iaer.

Another feature of Middle Dutch is that articles or prepositions were often joined on to the word they belonged to: tjaer (the year) and dlant (the land), as in the accompanying fragment from Karel ende Elegast. The text translates: “I will tell you a marvelous story, and a true one. Listen! One evening Charles was sleeping in Ingelheim on the Rhine. All the land you could see was his.”

There were also regional differences. Thus a clerk in Amsterdam in the 14th century would usually write lant, but in Utrecht he would write land. The modern system of double consonants for shortening the vowels was also known: compare tellen (short e) with slapen (long a) in the extract.

The invention of printing led to a more standardized approach.