Old Dutch
In linguistics, Old Dutch (Dutch: Oudnederlands) or Old Low Franconian (Dutch: Oudnederfrankisch) [3][4] is the set of dialects that evolved from Frankish spoken in the Low Countries during the Early Middle Ages, from around the 6th[5] or 9th[6] to the 12th century. Old Dutch is mostly recorded on fragmentary relics, and words have been reconstructed from Middle Dutch and Old Dutch loanwords in French.[7]
This article is about the medieval language. For the food manufacturing company, see Old Dutch Foods. For the restaurant in Rotterdam, see Old Dutch (restaurant).Old Dutch
The Low Countries
Gradually developed into Middle Dutch by mid-12th century[1][2]
Old Dutch is regarded as the primary stage in the development of a separate Dutch language. It was spoken by the descendants of the Salian Franks who occupied what is now the southern Netherlands, northern Belgium, part of northern France, and parts of the Lower Rhine regions of Germany. It evolved into Middle Dutch around the 12th century. The inhabitants of northern Dutch provinces, including Groningen, Friesland, and the coast of North Holland, spoke Old Frisian, and some in the east (Achterhoek, Overijssel, and Drenthe) spoke Old Saxon.
Terminology[edit]
Within the field of historical philology, the terminology for the oldest historical phase of the Dutch language traditionally includes both Old Dutch as well as Old Low Franconian. In English linguistic publications, Old Netherlandic is occasionally used in addition to the aforementioned terms.
Old Low Franconian, derives from the linguistic category first devised by the German linguist Wilhelm Braune (1850–1926), who used the term Franconian as a wastebasket taxon for the early West Germanic texts that he could not readily classify as belonging to either Saxon, Alemannic or Bavarian and assumed to derive from the language of the Franks.[8] He subsequently further divided this new grouping into Low, Middle and High Franconian based on the absence or presence of the Second Germanic consonant shift.[9] With the exception of Dutch, modern linguistic research has challenged the direct diachronical connection to Old Frankish for most of the varieties grouped under the broader "Franconian" category.[10][8] Nevertheless, the traditional terminology of the West Germanic varieties along assumed Late Classical tribal lines, typical of 19th and early 20th century Germanic linguistics, remains common.[8]
Within historical linguistics Old Low Franconian is synonymous with Old Dutch.[11][12] Depending on the author, the temporal boundary between Old Dutch and Old Frankish is either defined by the onset of the Second Germanic consonant shift in Eastern Frankish, the assimilation of an unattested coastal dialect showing North Sea Germanic-features by West Frankish during the closing of the 9th century,[13] or a combination of both. Some linguists use the terms Old Low Franconian or West Frankish to specifically refer to the (very sparsely attested) varieties of Old Dutch spoken prior its assimilation of the coastal dialect.
Old Dutch itself is further divided into Old West Dutch and Old East Dutch, with the descendants of Old West Dutch forming the dominant basis of the Middle Dutch literary language and Old East Dutch forming a noticeable substrate within the easternmost Dutch dialects, such as Limburgish.
Phonology[edit]
Early sound developments[edit]
Phonologically, Old Dutch stands in between Old Saxon and Old High German, sharing some innovations with the latter, and others with the former.
Old Dutch was spelt using the Latin alphabet.
The length of a vowel was generally not represented in writing probably because the missionaries, who were the ones capable of writing and teaching how to write, tended to base the written language on Latin, which also did not make a distinction in writing: dag "day" (short vowel), thahton "they thought" (long vowel). Later on, the long vowels were sometimes marked with a macron to indicate a long vowel: ā. In some texts long vowels were indicated by simply doubling the vowel in question, as in the placename Heembeke and personal name Oodhelmus (both from charters written in 941 and 797 respectively).
Grammar[edit]
Nouns[edit]
Old Dutch may have preserved at least four of the six cases of Proto-Germanic: nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. A fifth case, the instrumental, could have also existed.
The a declension[edit]
The -s ending in the masculine plural was preserved in the coastal dialects, as can be seen in the Hebban Olla Vogala text where nestas is used instead of nesta. Later on, the -s ending entered Hollandic dialects and became part of the modern standard language.