LL-L "Grammar" 2011.04.22 (01) [EN-NL]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 22 April 2011 - Volume 01
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From: Joachim <Osnabryg+Lowlands at googlemail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2011.04.22 (01) [EN, NL]

Grammatical dis-figurations (verbasteringen)/deformations of modern Dutch:
personal pronouns *(du), u, jij/je, jullie* and their verb forms



Beste Lowlanders,
Being bound to stay at home on this Good Friday (and some week more) because
of pelvic fracture (bicycle disaster 20 days ago) I'd like to post  a
problem of Dutch grammar (and the way grammars should present the historical
grown forms).

Should grammar just be the superficial systematization of existing forms or
should it regard and respect the historical characters and functions?

Since I began to learn Dutch I always stumbled over the jij/je as addressing
pronoun for a single person (and that in familiarity, no longer - as in the
distant Dutch past - as polite form). I am well used to the Low Saxon
*ji*as form for addressing a group of persons and as polite form of
address to
single person. Now using the semester break of my Dutch lesson, I traced the
question of the Dutch addressing personal pronouns and there history in the
linguistic books/texts in depth and came to the somewhat provocing thesis,
that there are severe and momentous misconfiguration/deformations in modern
Dutch and it's grammar.

The banning of the old *'du'* pronoun (together with the verbal ending *-s(t),
best, hest, maaks, keers, neems*) and the use of *jij/je (gij,ge)* for
single persons (first as polite form, but more and more as unique and
familiar form for addressing single and more persons - like English "you +
verb form") goes far back to about 15./16. century, while the following
linguistic innovations (polite form *"u = uwe/jouw edelheid (your noblesse)"
* - 17th century) and *"jullie"* as standard familiar form for addressing a
group are newer.

Thesis 1: It wasn't only or in first line the change of language habit of
broad people which led to the misconfiguration but the work of smart-aleck
grammatical creativity of grammar indoctrinators, taxonomists and the
national education system which lead to nowadays inconsistency of addressing
forms and their verbal forms.

Thesis 2: Common consciousness and grammatical classification of jij/ji, u
and jullie and their verb forms are not only new(-fashioned), but
structurally wrong.

Thesis 3 (consequent finding out of the above): The so-called
"Eenheidspluralis" (Dutch uniform outgoing verb-form on -en) is a myth.
To-day it is a matter of (decayed but authority-legitimized) language use
and official grammar, but it is structurally  deformed and historically not
true.

*Because I didn't got to present the text and the tables (!) in a consumable
way into the e-mail, I'm going to make hereby use of the newly established
possibility to attach a file.*

*➔** *To know my complete argumentation on the matter, please *open the
attached pdf-file* (in Netherlands, though, as the object matter).

I'm well aware that the treated distortion phenomena, once grammatically
established and generally used, hardly could changed back. But perhaps some
more historical consciousness could be integrated in Dutch language teaching
and grammar (and not only in historical linguistics, where I indeed found
the material).

How do you thing about that? Tell me, where my fact finding is erroneous and
- in case - why my concept of historically aware grammar is mistaken.

Precautionary I beg your pardon for mistakes in writing English an Dutch …
Happy Easter (and Western ;-) and never missing:



Met echt-westfœlsken »Goudgaun!«

joachim

--

Kreimer-de Fries

Osnabrügge => Berlin-Pankow



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