Middle Dutch - WikiHQ

Middle Dutch is a collective name for a number of closely related West Germanic dialects whose ancestor was Old Dutch. It was spoken and written between 1150 and 1500. Until the advent of Modern Dutch after 1500 or , there was no overarching standard language, but all dialects were mutually intelligible. During that period, a rich Medieval Dutch literature developed, which had not yet existed during Old Dutch. The various literary works of the time are often very readable for speakers of Modern Dutch since Dutch is a rather conservative language.

Phonology

Differences with Old Dutch

Several phonological changes occurred leading up to the Middle Dutch period.

Earlier Old Dutch , , merge into already in Old Dutch.
Voiceless fricatives become voiced syllable-initially: > , > (merging with from Proto-Germanic ), > . (10th or 11th century) The allophonic voicing of to (also found in modern Dutch) is also likely in that period, by analogy with the rest of the fricatives.
>
> or . The outcome is dialect-specific, with found in more western dialects and further east. This results in later pairs such as dietsc versus duitsc .
Various dialects also show > , while others retain . Compare southeastern Middle Dutch hiwen with modern Dutch huwen .
In word-initial position, some northern dialects also show a change from a falling to a rising diphthong ( > ) like Old Frisian. Cf. the accusative second-person plural pronoun iu > northern jou versus southern u .
Phonemisation of umlaut for back vowels, resulting in a new phoneme (from earlier Old Dutch before or ). In western dialects (including Hollandic, Zeelandic, Flemish), only short vowels were affected. In eastern dialects (Kleverlandish, Limburgish, most of Brabantian), long vowels and diphthongs were affected as well, as they were in other Germanic languages.
Insertion of between and a vowel.
Syllable-final > in some areas. This created pairs such as duwen versus douwen , or nu versus nou .
Lowering of > when not umlauted.
This change did not (fully) occur in the southwestern (Flemish) dialects. Hence, these dialects retain sunne "sun" where others have sonne.
Fronting of , > , . In some dialects, remained syllable-finally or before .
This change did not occur in Limburgish.
In Flemish, this change also affected cases that escaped the lowering in the previous change, hence sunne .
Vowel reduction: Vowels in unstressed syllables are weakened and merge into , spelled . (11th or 12th century) Long vowels seem to have remained as such, at least is known to have remained in certain suffixes (such as -kijn ).
Diphthongisation of the long mid vowels: , > , , .
Non-phonemic lowering of short , > , .
Open syllable lengthening: Short vowels in stressed open syllables become long. As a result, all stressed syllables in polysyllabic words become heavy. Old Dutch (original) long vowels are called "sharp-long" and indicated with a circumflex (â, ê, î, ô). Lengthened vowels are "soft-long" and are indicated with a macron (ā, ē, ī, ō).
Lengthened vowels initially have the same vowel quality as the short variants, so this produces , , , , .
and are then lowered to and respectively.
Lengthened , , remain distinct from the previously diphthongised long mid vowels.
In most dialects, lengthened merges with original , but in some, a distinction in backness develops.
This introduces many length alternations in grammatical paradigms, e.g. singular dag , plural .
Dental fricatives become stops: > , > , merging with existing and . (around 12th century)
The geminate (originating from Germanic *-þj-) develops into : > , > .
L-vocalisation: and > before dentals.
This change does not occur in Limburgish, which retains the distinction but undergoes its own round of vocalisation in modern times, producing and respectively.
Lengthening of vowels before + dental consonant. This did not occur in all dialects, and in some, was lengthened to . E.g. farth > vāert , ertha > āerde , wort > wōort .
Syncope of schwa in certain environments, particularly inflectional endings. This phonemicises the soft-long vowels produced by open syllable lengthening, which can now also occur in closed syllables. E.g. hēvet > hēeft.

Consonants

The consonants of Middle Dutch differed little from those of Old Dutch. The most prominent change is the loss of dental fricatives. In addition the sound was phonemicised during this period, judging from loanwords that retain to this day.

For descriptions of the sounds and definitions of the terms, follow the links on the headings.

{|class="wikitable" style=text-align:center

|+ Middle Dutch consonant phonemes

!colspan=2|

! Labial

! Dental/ Alveolar

! Palatal

! Velar

! Glottal

!colspan=2| Nasal

!rowspan=2|Plosive

!rowspan=2|Fricative

!colspan=2| Approximant

!colspan=2| Trill

Notes:

All obstruents underwent final-obstruent devoicing as in Old and Modern Dutch.
During the first part of the Middle Dutch period, geminated varieties of most consonants still occurred. Geminated was a plosive , retained in modern Limburgish as .
were bilabial, whereas were labiodental.
could have been either dental or alveolar . Laminal pronunciation is likely even in the latter case as it is universally found in modern Dutch, at least for the first three.
had a velar allophone when it occurred before the velars . In that position, was realized as a plosive , rather than a fricative found in other positions.
were most likely retracted .
could have been a bilabial approximant , without the velar element. This is commonly found in modern Southern dialects.
was alveolar, either a trill or a tap . Uvular pronunciations and were not widespread (as they are in modern Dutch) and were probably considered idiolectal or even a speech impediment.

Vowels

Most notable in the Middle Dutch vowel system, when compared to Old Dutch, is the appearance of phonemic rounded front vowels, and the merger of all unstressed short vowels.

Short vowels

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"

|+ Middle Dutch short vowels

! Front unrounded

! Front rounded

! Central

! Back

! Close

| rowspan="2" |

! Mid

! Open

| colspan="4" |

The exact height of is not certain, and may have varied between actual and a lower or even .
and could have also been and , as in modern Dutch. Especially the former is likely as could not have been higher than without seriously threatening the contrast with .
was a back in most varieties, but front probably occurred in some western dialects. One likely candidate is Utrechts, in which the short is famously very front in contemporary Dutch.

Long vowels and diphthongs

Long vowels and diphthongs cannot be clearly distinguished in Middle Dutch, as many long vowels had or developed a diphthongal quality, while existing diphthongs could also develop into monophthongs. Sometimes, this occurred only in restricted dialects, other developments were widespread.

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"

|+ Middle Dutch long vowels

! Front unr.

! Front rnd.

! Back

! Close

| ()

! Close-opening

| ()

! Mid-opening

| ()

! Mid

! Open

! Closing

| ()

The rounded front vowels in brackets only occurred in the eastern dialects, where umlaut of long vowels and diphthongs occurred.
The rounded back vowel only occurred in the Limburgish dialects.

Many details of the exact phonetics are uncertain, and seemed to have differed by dialect. The overall system is clear, however, as almost all the vowels remain distinct in modern Limburgish: , , , and appear in modern Limburgish as , , , and respectively.

The vowels , and developed from Old Dutch opening diphthongs, but their exact character in Middle Dutch is unclear. The following can be said:

In eastern Brabant, and all of Limburg, the pronunciation remained diphthongal.
is frequently found written with just , which may indicate a monophthongal pronunciation. never merged with the long vowel , however, as no rhyme pairs between these vowels are found.
In the coastal areas (Flanders, Holland), seems to have been a monophthong or . Before velar and labial consonants, the pronunciation was a close . This is revealed by the distinction in spelling between and .
In western Brabant, the pronunciation of was more close, probably monophthongal .

The vowels , and , termed "sharp-long" and denoted with a circumflex ê ô, developed from Old Dutch long vowels. The opening diphthong pronunciation was probably widespread, and perhaps once universal, as it is nowadays still found in both West Flemish and in Limburgish, at opposite ends of the Middle Dutch language area. In the general area in between, including standard Dutch, the vowels merged with the "soft-long" vowels during the early modern Dutch period.

In southern Flanders, southern Brabant and Holland, appears spelled with (e.g. stien for steen), while appears with (e.g. speghel for spieghel), suggesting a merger between these phonemes.
is sometimes found to rhyme with . It is possible that the two vowels merged under some conditions, while remaining distinct in other cases.
In Brabant, occasionally rhymes with . In western Brabant, this implies a close monophthongal pronunciation .

The vowels , and , termed "soft-long" and denoted with a macron ē ō, developed through the lengthening of Old Dutch short vowels in open syllables, but also frequently before . They were simple monophthongs in all Middle Dutch dialects, with the exception of western Flanders where later developed into . They might have been close-mid but also perhaps open-mid , and , as in modern Limburgish.

Bruce Donaldson argues that it is possible that, contrary to the widespread IPA transcription , the outcome of the merger between the "sharp-long" and "soft-long" mid vowels has never been monophthongal in Hollandic dialects; instead, the two series have merged into narrow closing diphthongs . This would mean that the original diphthongs from which the sharp-long vowels come have never been monophthongized in that area and words like steen 'stone' and boom 'tree' have always contained diphthongs in Hollandic, as the Standard German and Limburgish cognates Stein , stein , Baum and boum do, with the difference lying in quality. Furthermore, speakers with the Polder Dutch shift nowadays pronounce steen and boom almost indistinguishably from the Limburgish cognates, as and .

There were two open vowels, with "sharp-long" â developed from the Old Dutch long ā, and "soft-long" ā being the result of lengthening. These two vowels were distinguished only in Limburgish and Low Rhenish at the eastern end, and in western Flemish and coastal Hollandic on the western end. The relative backness of the two vowels was opposite in the two areas that distinguished them.

On the coast, â was front or , while ā was central or back .
In the eastern varieties, â was back , while ā was front or central . merged into during Middle Dutch, first in Low Rhenish, then later also in Limburgish further south.
In all dialects between, the two vowels were not distinguished. The phonetic realisation ranged from back (in Brabant) to front (Holland further inland).

The closing diphthong remained from the corresponding Old Dutch diphthong. It occurred primarily in umlauting environments, with appearing otherwise. Some dialects, particularly further west, had in all environments (thus cleene next to cleine). Limburgish preserved the diphthong wherever it was preserved in High German.

The closing diphthong has two different origins. In the vast majority of the Middle Dutch area, it developed through l-vocalization from older and followed by a dental consonant. In the eastern area, Limburg in particular, it was a remnant of the older diphthong as in High German, which had developed into elsewhere. L-vocalization occurred only in the modern period in Limburgish, and the distinction between and was preserved, being reflected as ów and aa respectively.

Prosody

In Limburgish, pitch accent (known in Dutch dialectology as the distinction between 'push tone' and 'dragging tone') was phonemicized at the beginning of the Middle Dutch period. It causes pairs like 'legs' vs. 'leg' to be distinguished by tone (and, secondarily, length, since the push tone shortens the entire syllable). This is also true of Central Franconian, spoken to the southeast.

Changes during the Middle Dutch period

Phonological changes that occurred during Middle Dutch:

> , > . This eliminated the sound from the language altogether.
and originating from and through final devoicing were not affected. This therefore resulted in alternations such as singular coninc versus plural coninghe , singular lamp versus plural lammere .
> (spelled or later ). It is unclear when this change happened, as the spelling does not seem to differentiate the two sounds (that is, and could both represent either sound).
> before plus another consonant, merging with original Old Dutch (< Proto-Germanic ). E.g. ende > einde, pensen > peinsen (from Old French penser). This change is found sporadically in Old Dutch already, but becomes more frequent in some Middle Dutch areas.
Epenthesis of in various clusters of sonorants. E.g. donre > donder, solre > solder, bunre > bunder. In modern Dutch, this change has become grammaticalised for the -er (comparative, agent noun) suffix when attached to a word ending in -r.
Shortening of geminate consonants, e.g. for bidden > , which reintroduces stressed light syllables in polysyllabic words.
Early diphthongization of long high vowels: > and > except before and , probably beginning around the 14th century.
The diphthongal quality of these vowels became stronger over time, and eventually the former merged with ei. But the diphthongal pronunciation was still perceived as unrefined and 'southern' by educated speakers in the sixteenth century, showing that the change had not yet spread to all areas and layers of Dutch society by that time. Similarly, the onset of eventually became as low as , becoming the rounded counterpart of .
Notably, this diphthongization parallels the mutation of long high vowels in the Great Vowel Shift of Late Middle English and Early New High German. However, those languages lowered previous all the way to . In Modern Dutch, many speakers from the Randstad region exhibit parallel lowering to from the conservative (see Polder Dutch).
Following the previous change, monophthongization of opening diphthongs: > , > . The result might have also been a short vowel (as in most Dutch dialects today), but they are known to have remained long at least before . As the tense often feature a schwa offglide before in contemporary Northern Dutch, it is possible that those dialects have never monophthongized and in that position; instead, they became mere allophones of and before .
Beginning in late Middle Dutch and continuing into the early Modern Dutch period, schwa was slowly lost word-finally and in some other unstressed syllables: vrouwe > vrouw, hevet > heeft. This did not apply consistently however, and sometimes both forms continued to exist side by side, such as mate and maat.
Word-final schwa was restored in the past singular of weak verbs, to avoid homophony with the present third-person singular because of word-final devoicing. However, it was lost in all irregular weak verbs, in which this homophony was not an issue: irregular dachte > dacht (present tense denkt), but regular opende did not become * because it would become indistinguishable from opent.
During the 15th century at the earliest,  begins to disappear when between a non-short vowel and a schwa.
The actual outcome of this change differed between dialects. In the more northern varieties and in Holland, the was simply lost, along with any schwa that followed it: > lui, lade > la, mede > mee. In the southeast, intervocalic instead often became : mede > meej.
The change was not applied consistently, and even in modern Dutch today many words have been retained in both forms. In some cases the forms with lost were perceived as uneducated and disappeared again, such as in Nederland and neer, both from neder (the form Neerland does exist, but is rather archaic in modern Dutch).

Dialects

Middle Dutch was not a single homogeneous language. The language differed by area, with different areas having a different pronunciation and often using different vocabulary. The dialect areas were affected by political boundaries. The sphere of political influence of a certain ruler also created a sphere of linguistic influence, with the language within the area becoming more homogeneous. Following, more or less, the political divisions of the time, several large dialect groups can be distinguished. However, the borders between them were not strong, and a dialect continuum existed between them, with spoken varieties near the edges of each dialect area showing more features of the neighbouring areas.

Middle Dutch has four major dialects groups:

Flemish in Flanders and Zeeuws in Zeeland,
Brabantic in Brussels, Leuven, Antwerp, Mechelen, Breda,
Hollandic in the county of Holland,
Limburgic in the East.

Flemish, Brabantic and Hollandic are known as West Franconian, while Limburgic is known as East Franconian (not to be confused with the High German dialect East Franconian).

In a finer classification there are:

Flemish
West Flemish
East Flemish
Brabantic
West Brabantic
East Brabantic
Hollandic
Utrechts
Limburgic

Brabantian

Brabantian was spoken primarily in the Duchy of Brabant. It was an influential dialect during most of the Middle Ages, during the so-called "Brabantian expansion" in which the influence of Brabant was extended outwards into other areas. Compared to the other dialects, Brabantian was a kind of "middle ground" between the coastal areas on one hand, and the Rhineland and Limburg on the other. Brabantian Middle Dutch has the following characteristics compared to other dialects:

Merger of â and ā, articulated as a back vowel .
Use of the form for the second-person plural pronoun.
>
Early diphthongization of and .
Tended towards Rhinelandic and/or Limburgish in the easternmost areas, with umlaut of long vowels and diphthongs. This in turn led to stronger use of umlaut as a grammatical feature, in for example diminutives.
Lack of umlaut > before , in western varieties.

Flemish

Flemish, consisting today of West and East Flemish and Zeelandic, was spoken in the County of Flanders, northern parts of the County of Artois and areas around the towns of Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer. Though due to their intermediary position between West Flemish and Brabantian, the East Flemish dialects have also been grouped with the latter. Flemish had been influential during the earlier Middle Ages (the "Flemish expansion") but lost prestige to the neighbouring Brabantian in the 13th century. Its characteristics are:

Fronted realisation for â.
Unrounding of rounded front vowels.
Loss of , with the occasional hypercorrection found in texts. This allowed and to eventually weaken to and without any threat of a merger with , a pronunciation found in modern Flemish.
Opening diphthong articulation of ê and ô, often spelled and .
Old Dutch developed into instead of , thus giving forms such as vier ("fire") where other dialects have vuur.
Lowering of to before + consonant, often also with lengthening. The change is generally limited to West Flemish before dentals, while before labials and velars it is more widespread.
Lack of umlaut > before .
> in some words.
> sometimes before + consonant in West Flemish.

Hollandic

Hollandic was spoken in the County of Holland. It was less influential during most of the Middle Ages but became more so in the 16th century during the "Hollandic expansion", during which the Eighty Years' War took place in the south. It shows the following properties:

Strong Ingvaeonic influence from earlier Frisian presence in the area. This became more apparent closer to the coast and further north (West Friesland).
â and ā merged and had a fronted articulation (which forms the basis for the modern standard Dutch pronunciation).
Occasional occurrence of the Ingvaeonic nasal-spirant law. Seen in some place names, such as -mude ("mouth") where more southwestern areas retain the nasal: -monde.
Use of the form ji for the second-person plural pronoun.
Retention of .
Lack of umlaut > before .

Limburgish

Limburgish was spoken by the people in the provinces of modern Dutch and Belgian Limburg. It was not clearly tied to one political area, instead being divided among various areas, including the Duchy of Limburg (which was south of modern Limburg). It was also the most divergent of the dialects.

Generally, a strong "southeastern" influence, tying it more to Middle High German in some respects ("Colognian expansion"). The effects of the High German consonant shift are occasionally found.
Related to the above, emergence of a phonemic pitch accent, both in Limburgish and Central Franconian.