In linguistics, Old Dutch (Modern Dutch: ) or Old Low Franconian (Modern Dutch: ) (dbnl.org): "De term Oudnederlands (vanuit een ander perspectief ook wel Oudnederfrankisch genoemd) ..." is the set of dialects that evolved from Frankish spoken in the Low Countries during the Early Middle Ages, from around the 6th Page 55: "Uit de zesde eeuw dateren de oudst bekende geschreven woorden en tekstjes in de Lage Landen, waarmee de periode van het oud-Nederlands begint." [From the 6th century date the oldest known text from the Low Countries, with which the period of Old Dutch begins.] 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.Webster's New World Dictionary: Old Dutch
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) instead spoke Old Saxon.
Terminology 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. 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. 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. 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.Alfred Klepsch: Fränkische Dialekte, published on 19th of October 2009; in: Historisches Lexikon Bayerns (accessed November 21st 2020)
Within historical linguistics Old Low Franconian is synonymous with Old Dutch.Alderik H. Blom: Glossing the Psalms: The Emergence of the Written Vernaculars in Western Europe from the Seventh to the Twelfth Centuries, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017, p. 134-135.Hans Frede Nielsen: The Germanic Languages: Origins and Early Dialectal Interrelations, University of Alabama Press, 1989, p. 2: "The earliest extant material in Old Low Franconian (or Old Dutch) is from the 9th century ..." 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,Michiel de Vaan: The Dawn of Dutch: Language contact in the Western Low Countries before 1200, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017, p. 32 (in chapter 5: History of research on the 'Frisian question' in Belgium and the Netherlands). 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 to 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.
Origins and characteristics
Before the advent of Old Dutch or any of the Germanic languages, Germanic dialects were mutually intelligible. The North Sea Germanic languages were spoken in the whole of the coastal parts of the Netherlands and Belgium. Old Frisian was one of these languages, and elements of it survived through the Frisian language, spoken in the province of Friesland in the North of the Netherlands. In the rest of the coastal region, these languages were mostly displaced following the withdrawal to England of the migrating Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who gave rise to Old English.
It was largely replaced by Weser–Rhine Germanic dialects, spoken by the Salian Franks. It spread from northern Belgium and the southern Netherlands to the coast and evolved into Old Dutch. It has, however, a North sea Germanic substrate. Linguists typically date this transition to around the 5th century.
Relation with other West Germanic languages
Central Franconian and Old High German Old Dutch is divided into Old West Low Franconian and Old East Low Franconian (Limburgian); however, these varieties are very closely related, the divergence being that the latter shares more traits with neighboring historical forms of Central Franconian dialects such as Ripuarian and Moselle Franconian. While both forms of Low Franconian were instrumental to the framing of Middle Dutch, Old East Low Franconian did not contribute much to Standard Dutch, which is based on the consolidated dialects of Holland and Brabant.
During the Merovingian period, the Central Franconian dialects were influenced by Old Low Franconian (Old Dutch), resulting in certain linguistic loans which yielded a slight overlap of vocabulary, most of which relates to warfare. In addition is the subsumption of the High German consonant shift, a set of phonological changes beginning around the 5th or 6th century that did not influence Old Dutch but extensively influenced Central Franconian and other Old High German dialects.
Old Saxon, Old English and Old Frisian Old English, Old Frisian and (to a lesser degree) Old Saxon share the application of the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law. Old Dutch was considerably less affected than those other three languages, but a dialect continuum formed/existed between Old Dutch, Old Saxon and Old Frisian. Despite sharing some particular features, a number of disparities separate Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old English and Old Dutch. One such difference is that Old Dutch used -a as its plural a-stem noun ending, while Old Saxon and Old English employed -as or -os. Much of the grammatical variation between Old Dutch and Old Saxon is similar to that between Old Dutch and Old High German.
It is also found that Old Dutch had lost the dual number for its pronouns, unlike Old English, which used to refer to "the two of us". Old Dutch would have used both to refer to that and to refer to many more people in the "us" group, much like Modern Dutch and English.
Relation to Middle Dutch Old Dutch naturally evolved into Middle Dutch with some distinctions that approximate those found in most medieval West Germanic languages. The year 1150 is often cited as the time of the discontinuity, but it actually marks a time of profuse Dutch writing whose language is patently different from Old Dutch.
The most notable difference between Old and Middle Dutch is vowel reduction. Back vowels (a, o) in non-stressed syllables are rather frequent in Old Dutch, but in Middle Dutch, they are reduced to a schwa:
{| class="wikitable" |- ! Old Dutch !! Middle Dutch !! English |- | vogala || vogele || bird (fowl) |- | daga / dago || daghe || days (nominative/genitive) |- | brecan || breken || to break |- | gescrivona || ghescreven || written (past participle)
The following is a translation of Psalm 55:18, taken from the Wachtendonck Psalms; it shows the evolution of Dutch, from the original Old Dutch, written 900, to modern Dutch, but so accurately copies the Latin word order of the original that there is little information that can be garnered on Old Dutch syntax. In Modern Dutch, recasting is necessary to form a coherent sentence.
{| class="wikitable" |- ! Old Dutch | Irlōsin sal an frithe sēla mīna fan thēn thia ginācont mi, wanda under managon he was mit mi. |- ! Middle Dutch | Erlosen sal hi in vrede siele mine van dien die genaken mi, want onder menegen hi was met mi. |- ! Modern Dutch (with old word order) | Verlossen zal hij in vrede ziel mijn van zij die aanvallen mij, want onder menigen hij was met mij. |- ! Modern Dutch (with new word order) | Hij zal mijn ziel verlossen in vrede van hen die mij aanvallen, want onder menigen was hij met mij. |- ! English | He will deliver my soul in peace from those who attack me, for, amongst many, he was with me.
Surviving texts
Old Dutch texts are extremely rare and much more limited than for related languages like Old English and Old High German. Most of the earliest texts written in the Netherlands were written in Latin, rather than Old Dutch. Some of the Latin texts, however, contained Old Dutch words interspersed with the Latin text. Also, it is hard to determine whether a text actually was written in Old Dutch, as the Germanic languages spoken at that time were not standardised and were much more similar to one another.
Oldest word (108) Several words that are known to have developed in the Netherlands before Old Dutch was spoken have been found, and they are sometimes called (English: "Old Netherlandic" or "Old Dutch") in a geographic sense. The oldest known example, 'mudflat', is already mentioned in Tacitus' Histories (Book 5), in Latinised form as vadam (acc. sg.), as the name of a village, Vada, probably reflecting Early Germanic *wada. The word exclusively referred to the region and ground type that is now known as the Wadden Sea. However, since the word existed long before Old Dutch did (and even before its parent language, Frankish), it cannot be considered part of the vocabulary of Old Dutch but rather of Proto-Germanic.
Bergakker inscription (425–450)
This sentence has been interpreted as "Haþuþyw's. I/He grant(s) a flame (i.e. brand, sword) to the select". It was discovered on a sword sheath mounting, excavated in 1996 in the Dutch village of Bergakker and is perhaps better described as Frankish than Old Dutch (Frankish was the direct parent language of Old Dutch). The text however, shows the beginning of Old Dutch morphology. The word ann, found in the partially-translated inscription is coined as the oldest Dutch by linguists Nicoline van der Sijs and Tanneke Schoonheim from . They attribute that word to the ancestor of the modern Dutch verb root gun, through the addition of the prefix ge-. (Auteurs: Nicoline van der Sijs en Tanneke Schoonheim | 6 juni 2007) (An English cognate probably survives in to own (up) in the sense of 'to acknowledge, concede'.) Its modern meaning is roughly "to think someone deserves something, to derive satisfaction from someone else's success", and it is commonly translated as "grant" or "bestow".
Salic Law (6th century)