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Linguistically speaking, Middle Dutch is a collective name for a number of closely related West Germanic dialects (whose ancestor was Old Dutch) which were spoken and written between 1150 and 1500 in the present-day Dutch-speaking area. There was at that time as yet no overarching standard language, but they were all mutually intelligible. In historic literature Diets and Middle Dutch (Middelnederlands) are used interchangeably to describe this whole of dialects from which later standard Dutch would be derived. Although already at the beginning several Middle-Dutch variations were present, the similarities between the different regional languages were much stronger than their differences, especially for written languages and various literary works of that time today are often very readable for modern Dutch speakers, Dutch being a rather conservative language. By many non-linguists Middle Dutch is often referred to as Diets.
Unity within Middle Dutch
Orthography Contemporary Dutch, like the majority of languages on earth today, has a standard form. Middle Dutch had not 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. Another difference was that every writer wrote in his own dialects, 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". Another important difference is that a medieval Dutch speaker tried to write down far more different sounds than the contemporary speaker, which is logical as people in those days read texts out loud. Then there was the problem with the letters themselves. The Dutch language used the Latin alphabet which is 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 letters "j", "ij", "k", "w" and "v" made it into Dutch spelling. Then there was the matter of personal taste, many writers thought it was more esthetical to use a "c" (like Latin) instead of "k". Examples include ic (ik, I) copen (kopen, to buy) and coninc (koning, king). 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, but more often they added an "i" or "e" at the end. Both forms are still present in modern Dutch, although the first is more common than the latter. Pronouns Middle Dutch pronouns differ little from their modern counterparts. The main differences are in the second person. Second person singular is "du" the plural in this case was "ghi" which later evolved into second person singular "gij/jij" and "ge/je". This was because middle Dutch also used "ghi" for a polite form and this in time replaced the informal "du", and thus became singular instead of plural. Middle Dutch case system Middle Dutch had a case system, somewhat similar to modern written German. Since the Middle Ages Dutch has gradually lost an active case system, first in the spoken language, much later in the written language, so it is now mostly limited to fixed expressions. The spelling reform of 1947 removed most remaining parts of the case system, among them the accusative. However, Middle Dutch and Modern Dutch were very similar, apart from the case system; one of the most prominent differences of contemporary Dutch is that it uses vast amounts of prepositions, far more than Middle Dutch, to compensate with the loss of the case system. Strong inflection (adjective clein = small, noun worm = worm, daet = deed/action, broot = bread) Weak inflection (Nouns ending in "-e") (adjective clein = small, noun hane = rooster, wonde = wound, beelde = image) See also | ||||||||||
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