LL-L "Language history" 2009.08.02 (02) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 02 August 2009 - Volume 02
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From: Diederik Masure <didimasure at hotmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language history" 2009.07.30 (01) [EN]

The a/e-wechsel is indeed a twofold problem, or actually a threefold if we
also take laag/leeg, but that's indeed a case of umlaut which stands mostly
on itself as it's the only umlaut of long â which reached so far west it
influenced Afrikaans.

About the long ee/aa in peerd/paard and more: this sound was probably èè in
older Dutch, and still is in 90% of Duch dialects (or in variants as ee, eê,
iê etc). Even modern dialect atlasses only show /aa/ in the South-Holland
area. The long aa in words of this group (heerd/haard 'hearth', geern/gaarne
German 'gerne', eerd(e)/aarde 'earth', zweerd/zwaard 'sword', hering/haring
'herring', kleer/klaar 'ready/clear', lanteern/lantaarn 'lantern',
weerd/waard 'worth', steert/staart 'tail') and a few more.

Anyway, this /aa/ in Standard Dutch seems to be due to the fact that the
Holland dialects where standard Dutch came to exist and started to be
spoken, had the ingvaeonic aa -> èè shift, so words like schaap (sheep),
jaar (year) etcetera were pronounced scheep, jeer etc., the sound in steert,
peerd, heerd probably coincided with this. So when those old Hollanders
started speaking more and more standard-Dutch they probably started
replacing all these e-like sounds with /aa/ (supported by the ae-spelling
for èè that could occur in paerd and such already too in some traditions).
So the dialects in southern Holland now almost all have standard /aa/ in
jaar, schaap, and parallel staart, paard, but in North Holland the archaic
dialects of old people still have jeer, scheep and thus also peerd, steert
and so on. In hardly any autochthonous dialect outside the southern
Hollandish dialect is the sound in peerd, eerd, hering identical to that in
schaap, laten, jaar and ander a-words. Earlier mentioned limburgian paerd
contrasts with joôr, schoôp etc so this a-like sound doesn't say anything as
any long a changed to o-like sounds.

So about the short a/e before r, this is much more complicated as St. Dutch
is completely inconsistent here.
 Some eastern'ish dialects (eg. Brabant) have changed all historical /er/
and /ar/ to /er/, later around antwerp this changed to /ar/ or /aer/
depending on the following sound, but still no disinction is made between
etymological er and ar.
There are also dialect areas where /er/ was changed to /ar/, or /or/, so
when standard Dutch was made, sometimes they chose the historical e or a,
sometimes the dialectform with the "wrong" vowel. Eg. 'hart' (heart) is
still 'hert(e)' in very many dialects and the e is historical here, but
somehow now Dutch has come to prefer the /a/. But zerk (gravestone) compared
to German sark shows that it was an /a/, but here the form with /e/ from one
of the /ar/->/er/ dialects is chosen. /or/-forms are pretty rare in Standard
Dutch as they didnt have much tradition in middle Dutch and come from less
prestigious dialects, but eg. tornen < ternen (dunno the English
translation).
As afrikaans is not from 1 dialect completely the situation about /ar/ vs
/er/ might also be a bit a mess historically speaking, as it might have
chosen some words from an ar -> er dialect and some from a er -> ar dialect.

Schönefelt's historical grammar of dutch might be interesting reading as it
goes a bit more in-depth on this i think.

Diederik Masure, since 5 days Bergen (Norway)

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From: R. F. Hahn
<sassisch at yahoo.com<http://uk.mc264.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=sassisch@yahoo.com>
>
Subject: Language history

Diederik:

tornen < ternen (dunno the English translation).

'to meddle'

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

P.S.: Diederik, have you checked out the Hanseatic Museum and other
Hanseatic sites in Bergen (e.g. Bryggen, St. John's Church)?
Folks, check out Bryggen, the old Hanseatic quarters, with a video as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryggen

•

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