Middle Dutch - Orthography

Orthography

Contemporary Dutch has a standard form. Middle Dutch had no such thing as it was not until the middle of the 16th century that efforts were made to standardize the language. As a result, the Dutch speakers of the Middle Ages had a very free way of writing. In fact in some old books, the same word appears in different spellings on the same page. Then there was the problem with the letters themselves. The Dutch language used the Latin alphabet which was perfect for writing Latin, but wasn't for the Dutch language. Dutch for instance has far more vowels and consonant sounds which meant people literally ran out of letters. Several adjustments were therefore needed and it took quite a while before the spelling became more standardised. Then there was the matter of personal taste, and many writers thought it was more aesthetic to follow French or Latin practice, leading to sometimes rather unusual spellings.

In general, every writer wrote in his own dialect, and often in a very phonetical way and different pronunciation led to different ways of writing. The modern Dutch word maagd ("maiden") for example was sometimes written as maghet or maegt, but also meget, magt, maget, magd, and mecht. Some spellings such as magd reflect an early tendency to write the underlying phonemic value. However, by and large, spelling was phonetic, which is logical as people in those days read texts out loud.

The letter z in was not used regularly at all in Middle Dutch, with s being used to represent both /z/ and /s/. As a general rule, k and gh were written before e or i, as in kiesen (kiezen, "to choose"), ghedaen (gedaan, "done"). They were written c or g elsewhere, as in ic (ik, "I"), copen (kopen, "to buy") and coninc (koning, "king"). The combination /kw/ was normally written qu, such as in quam (kwam, "came").

And finally, there was no difference between short and long vowels, so that people had to find a solution for that as well. Sometimes they just duplicated the vowels, as in oo, ee, ij (originally a double i). But sometimes an i or e was added, as in ui for /yː/, and oi or oe for /oː/. The vowel /øː/ was variably written eu, ue, o or oe. Modern Dutch preserves the spellings eu, ui and ij, although the latter two are now diphthongs. Following a sound change in late Old Dutch, in which short vowels were naturally lengthened in open syllables, the practice of writing long vowels single in open syllables was established, although it was applied inconsistently through most of the Middle Dutch period.