History of Taiwan - George Mackay

 

                                                    The Ho-be Mackay Hospital in Tamsui

The Canadian missionary George Mackay (1844-1901) arrived in Taiwan in 1872. He was based in Tamsui (淡水)  which had been opened to Westerners by the Qing regime after the Treaty of Tientsin in 1862. Mackay soon rented a house which he began to use as a hospital - one of the first, if not the first, hospitals in Taiwan to practise Western medicine. It was named the Ho-be Mackay Hospital, Ho-be being the name for Tamsui in the Ketagalan indigenous language. Wounded soldiers were treated there in the Sino-French War of 1884. Mackay also founded the Oxford College, which was the first Western style university college in Taiwan and the forerunner of the Aletheia University, which still functions in Tamsui. There is a Presbyterian church in Tamsui which was founded by Mackay. He also founded other churches throughout Taiwan. He married a Taiwanese woman and they had several children. Mackay died in 1901 and was buried in Tamsui. There are several monuments to him and institutions such as hospitals named after him.

Contact between Dutch and Ainu in Tokugawa Japan

Dutch-Ainu-Japanese vocabulary

There is no evidence of the Dutch having contact with Ainu people during the Tokugawa period. The Dutch were mainly confined to Deshima, an island in the far west of the Japanese archipelago, while the Ainu lived in the north of Honshu and on Hokkaido (then called Ezo). Nevertheless, there is a  Dutch-Ainu-Japanese vocabulary consisting of 43 sheets in the Special Collections of Leiden University Library (Serrurier 95, Kerlen 1809). We do not know who compiled it or when, but there are a few clues. The introduction, written in Dutch, records that it was based on ‘an original publication by a Japanese’ (een Originele ‘uitgave’ van een Japander’). The copy in Leiden University Library has the ex libris ‘Uit de Verzam[eling] van Overmeer Fisscher’. This refers to Johannes van Overmeer Fisscher, who held various positions at Deshima. He left Japan in 1829, so this may give us a terminus ante quem for publication. 

As for the compiler, one possibility is that it was one of the Dutch interpreters sent to Ezo to make contact with Russian sailors, such as Baba Sajūrō (馬場佐十郎 (also Teiyū 貞由1787-1822)), but currently we can say nothing more concrete. For each word, from left to right, there is the Dutch term reading horizontally, then vertically the sound of the Ainu equivalent in Latin script (influenced by Dutch spelling) and katakana, followed by the Japanese equivalent in romaji and kanji. Some of the words, such as the numbers, are what one might expect to find in such a vocabulary. There is also trading terminology such as the unit of measure the gantang (Ganting in the vocabulary), but also Paap, a derogatory Dutch term for Catholics. In fact, there seems little logic to the order of the words which may be a function of the resources available. Nevertheless, it is an interesting and possibly unique example of contact between the Dutch and Ainu languages in Tokugawa Japan.

A sign of true friendship

As is well known, the Dutch (and other Europeans) went to Japan from the seventeenth century onwards for the purpose of trade. There was always at least one physician to take care of the Europeans at the Dutch trading post on Deshima and in some cases he was a German. Probably the most famous of these is Phillip Franz von Siebold. He established his own medical school near Nagasaki and made friends with many Japanese. Often, for fun, he would give them Dutch or Latin names. He gave one Japanese the Latin name Wilhelmus Botanicus reflecting his interest in plants. This was Katsuragawa Hoan (also Hoken). Several members of the Katsuragawa family associated with the Dutch and often signed themselves with a Dutch version of their name - Kaneel Rivier ('Cinnamon River'). The Europeans and Japanese often exchanged gifts. In 1827 Hoan gave Von Siebold a copy of Seikei Zusetsu 成形図説 (‘Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Agricultural Products’), first printed in 1804 and consisting of some 30 volumes. This included marvellous illustrations of indigenous Japanese plants accompanied by their names in Japanese, Latin and Dutch. This copy can be found in Leiden University Library. In the inside cover of volume 30, Hoan wrote a dedication in beautiful cursive Dutch ‘Aan de Heer Siebold geschenk van zijn vriend Kaneel Rivier Junior (i.e. Katsuragawa) W. Botanicus Den 5 Siguats 9 Jaar Bunzij (i.e. 1827) - to Mr. Siebold, a present from his friend Cinnamon River Junior. W. Botanicus. This provides a wonderful illustration of the friendships that evolved between the Japanese and Europeans in nineteenth-century Japan, as well as reminding us that many Japanese learnt Dutch in Tokugawa Japan.

Further reading: Chattterjee, Shantonu Abe, and Tinde van Andel (2019) ‘Lost Grains and Forgotten Vegetables from Japan: the Seikei Zusetsu Agricultural Catalog (1793–1804)’ Economic Botany, 73(3), pp. 375–389.

A recently-discovered translation from Dutch to Siraya

It's not often in one's career that one comes across a book or manuscript that has lain 'hidden' for several hundred years, but by chance this happened to me recently. In Amsterdam in 1661, the Dutch missionary Daniël Gravius published a volume comprising his translations of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John in the Formosan language, Siraya, a member of the broader Austronesian family of languages. Until recently, it was thought that only the translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew had survived. However, I recently identified a copy of the 1661 publication which contains both Gospel translations. The Gospel of St. John differs from that of St. Matthew in several respects and will therefore allow scholars in this field to increase their knowledge of this language, which became extinct in the nineteenth century. Hopefully, it will also add to our knowledge of the history of Austronesian or Formosan languages in Taiwan and Austronesian languages more generally.

The translation is based on the Dutch States Bible (Statenbijbel), first published in 1637. This includes several Latin and Greek words, which have been carried over into Siraya. Gravius's publication consists of 70 folios of Dutch and Siraya parallel texts. It is a good example of the Bible translations that Dutch missionaries made in the seventeenth century into languages in East Asia and also illustrates how they mastered new languages such as Siraya in order to translate the Bible and other Christian literature into these languages. It is also a good example of the role that serendipity plays in scholarship!

Dutch loanwords in Taiwanese Hokkien

The fort at Baimiwong, near Keelung, established by the Spanish and the Dutch on Taiwan

Some loanwords travel from one language to another and then to another and so on. As for Dutch loanwords, cookie is a good example. It started out as koekje, which was taken to the New World by the Dutch, jumped ship to American English as cookie and is now used in a host of other languages such as Korean. I have previously written in this blog about Dutch loanwords in Japanese. Estimates vary, but there are well over 150 such loanwords still in common use in Japanese. Japanese exported some of these loanwords to other languages during the expansion of the Japanese Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1895, in the wake of the Japanese victory over Qing China in the first Sino-Japanese War, Taiwan became a dependency of Japan and remained so until 1945. During this period, the dominant form of Chinese spoken in Taiwan was Taiwanese Hokkien. This variety evolved in southern China, in particular the province of Fujian. During the Qing period many people from this region migrated to Taiwan (Mandarin would only gradually become the dominant form of Chinese on Taiwan after the arrival of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang regime in 1949-1950). As a result of contact between Japanese and Taiwanese Hokkien during the Japanese period. Hokkien adopted many Japanese loanwords. In 2011, the Taiwanese government made a list of 172 commonly-used Japanese words in Taiwanese Hokkien. Several of these are loanwords from Dutch. These include ‘beer’ (Modern Taiwanese Language (MLT) transcription bielux/bieluq) from the Dutch bier, ‘gas’ (gafsuq) (Dutch gas), ‘bag’ (khabarng) from the old Dutch word kabas, and ‘cup’ (khokpuq) (Dutch kop). The Dutch words had typically been modified to conform to Japanese pronunciation. Today in Taiwan it is typically the older generation which still speaks Hokkien (and some can still speak Japanese), but talking to younger people they are still familiar with these words, although they are usually unaware that they had made the journey across the world from Netherlands to East Asia.

Dutch graffiti in Taiwan

The Dutch East India Company had a trading post in southern Taiwan near modern-day Tainan from 1624 to 1662. They were eventually forced to leave the island after a siege by the Chinese warlord-cum-merchant Zheng Chenggong (國姓爺) (Koxinga) (1624-1662). However, a couple of years later, in 1664, they returned to the island, this time to Quelang (now Keelung City), in the north of Taiwan, where first the Spanish and then the Dutch had previously built fortifications. The Dutch had hoped to build a ‘New Taiwan Factory’ to resume their former trade. However, this proved difficult and so in 1668 the Dutch decided to abandon Taiwan for good. Nevertheless, they left their mark on the island in several ways. As I mentioned in a previous blog, one of these ways was in Taiwanese placenames. Another way was in Dutch graffiti. Some of the Dutch fortifications at Quelang were on the island now known as Heping Island (和平島 Hépíng Dǎo). Nineteenth-century visitors to Heping, such as the French-American diplomat Charles le Gendre, recorded the names of Dutchmen, possibly soldiers, that had been carved into the walls of a cave there. Two such names were Marcus Eeckman and Jacob Bosch. Were they bored soldiers using the cave as a place of resort? Currently, we do not know, but the possibility is there. The cave still exists, known locally as the ‘Dutch cave’. Sadly, the waves of the Pacific Ocean have now washed the names away. But for over two hundred years these graffiti were silent reminders of the Dutch presence on this beautiful tropical island.

The Dutch cave on Heping Island

Toponyms in Taiwan

In the early seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company was keen to establish a trading post in China. Together with the English it attempted to eject the Portuguese from Macau, but was defeated and withdrew to the Penghu islands near Taiwan. The Ming authorities did not allow the Dutch to remain there, but it was agreed that they could establish a base on Taiwan, which lay outside Ming jurisdiction. In 1624, the Dutch set up a trading post, initially called Fort Oranje, but later Fort Zeelandia in Southern Taiwan, close to modern-day Tainan. The Dutch presence in Taiwan caused another European power, the Spanish, some concerns. They had been established in the nearby Philippines since the previous century, and were concerned the Dutch might try to gain a foothold there. As a pre-emptive measure, the Spanish sent a fleet to northern Taiwan, where they established a colony in 1626. Both the Spanish and the Dutch combined trade with trying to convert local people to Christianity, Catholic in the case of the Spanish, Calvinist in that of the Dutch. Both European powers also took to naming local places in the European manner. The Spanish called one of the settlements in their territory Santiago - i.e. St. James. The Dutch ejected the Spanish from Taiwan in 1642. However, they kept the names of some of the Spanish settlements. Santiago, which is on the north-east coast of Taiwan, became simply St. Jago. The Dutch in turn were ejected by the Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong or Koxinga in 1662. However, some of the European names survived, albeit in an altered form. Santiago or St. Jago is now Sāndiāojiǎo (三貂角). There is a lighthouse on a cliff at Sāndiāojiǎo, which was built by another colonial power in Taiwan, the Japanese. However, despite these various colonial powers occupying Taiwan, the name of St. James lives on there, in small part thanks to the Dutch.

Western coin collecting in Tokugawa Japan

Although much of the contact between the Dutch and Japanese between 1609 and 1860 involved trade, several people on each side engaged in cultural and intellectual exchange. On the Dutch side, the head of the trading post in the late eighteenth century, Isaac Titsingh, was a well-educated, cultured man who helped Japanese learn Dutch and told them about cultural and scientific developments in the West. He struck up friendships with several Japanese including the daimyō of Tamba and rangakusha Kutsuki Masatsuna (1750-1802). Titsingh and Masatsuna corresponded with each other after Titsingh left Japan, first for Chinsura in Bengal and then Europe. Rather touchingly Masatsuna would ask Titsingh to correct his written Dutch. Masatsuna, who like all Japanese, could not leave the country, would ask Titsingh to supply him with Dutch books and in return he would send Titsingh rare Japanese and Chinese coins. Masatsuna was an avid collector of Dutch and other European coins and he wrote a book on Western coins, Seiyō senpu (西洋銭譜, 1787), many of which Titsingh had supplied to him. In the wood-block printed book Masatsuna presented images of the coins and used these as a motivation for discussing their countries of origin. One coin is a Dutch East India Company duit. It has ‘DUYT IAVAS 1783’ on one side and a transliteration of this in Arabic script with the Arabic numerals for 1783 on the other side. Some coins have the VOC insignia, but perhaps the most interesting example of a Dutch coin is one dated 1779 on page 30. On one side it has the French motto of the House of Orange, JE MAINTIENDRAI. On the other side is an extensive Dutch inscription, commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the Union of Utrecht (1579). In the accompanying description Masatsuna renders Utrecht in katakana as ヲイトレキトwoitorekito. This is but one of the many ways in which Japanese engaged with the Dutch language during the Tokugawa period.

p. 30 of Kutsuki Masatsuna's Seiyō senpu  The keen-eyed readers of Dutch will note a couple of mistakes but it is no mean achievement to reproduce this in wood cut.

Snowy view of Holland

Although the primary reason for the Dutch going to Japan from around 1600 onwards was to trade, they often brought gifts with them in order to endear themselves to local rulers including the shogun. Among the gifts they presented to Japanese were telescopes, clocks and peep-boxes. Peep-boxes were devices into which the viewer could peer and see different views that were on cards inserted in the box. Of particular interest is the fact that the pictures on the cards often gave the viewer a sense of the depth of a scene. This was a result of the use of single-point perspective, to which the Japanese were introduced in works of art imported by the Dutch (although earlier arrivals such as the Portuguese probably also brought such paintings to Japan). 

In the late eighteenth century, there was a particular craze for all things Dutch including these peep-boxes. The above picture was used in such a device. In the Japanese inscription in the right-hand margin one can read Oranda yukimi no zu in kanji with a katakana gloss. Oranda, in fact derived from the Portuguese word for the country came to stand not just for Holland, but for things foreign in general. The text means ‘Snowy View of Holland’. One can perhaps see a little snow in the picture, but it seems to owe more to somewhere in East or South-East Asia rather than the Low Countries.

Further reading: Yasumasa OKA, ‘Hollandisme in Japanese Craftwork’.

Dutch drainage workers on the Upper Spree

                                                The Hollaenderwindmuehle in Straupitz

As the recently-established project, Vertrokken Nederlands/Emigrant Dutch is demonstrating, people have been emigrating from the Low Countries to elsewhere in Europe and indeed in the world for hundreds of years. There are many reasons for this including difficult economic conditions, religious persecution and the search for 'a better life'. In some cases, it is the skills that migrants from the Low Countries have that allow them to emigrate. In previous posts on this blog, I have discussed the contribution textile workers from the Low Countries made to revitalizing the economies of English towns such as Norwich and Colchester. Another skill that the Dutch in particular have in abundance is drainage engineering.

In England, the Dutch drainage engineer, Sir Cornelis Vermuyden, led teams from the Low Countries and England to drain land in Essex, the Fens and the Lincolnshire/Yorkshire border. The Dutch River in Lincolnshire is one toponym that bears testimony to Vermuyden's work. In Poland, too, many workers moved from the Low Countries to assist with draining land around Gdansk and marshy land along the River Vistula. Settlements with 'holender' or variants thereof in their names are testimony to the Dutch presence there.

Another suggestion is that drainage workers from the Low Countries moved to the Upper Spree region in Brandenburg in Germany in order to assist with draining this marshy area. One physical, although by no means, conclusive, piece of evidence for the Dutch presence is of a 'Holland' wind mill at Straupitz (Tšupc) neat Cottbus. This was built in the early nineteenth century, replacing an earlier mill from the seventeenth century. Further work would need to be done before the presence of Dutch drainage workers could be confirmed, but it is certainly a suggestion that deserves attention. If it were found that Dutch were in this area, the question would arise whether any traces of the language remain. One challenge would be to distinguish between the influence of varieties of German and varieties of Dutch. The other main language spoken in the area is Lower Sorbian, a West Slavic language, still spoken in some villages around Cottbus. It would be interesting to explore whether any traces of Dutch can be found in this language.

                                             

Blog no. 50 - Printing Dutch books in Norwich

A blue plaque commemorating Solempne in Norwich

To celebrate reaching the 50th post in this blog and 5,000 page views, I can think of no more appropriate subject than Anthony de Solempne (spelt variously), who for several years ran a printing press in my hometown of Norwich. Solempne was from Brabant in the South Netherlands and arrived in Norwich in 1567 along with his family. It is perhaps more appropriate to call Solempne a printer/publisher, for it is likely that he was assisted by a typesetter Albert Christaensz from Holland. Between 1568 and 1570 Solempne ran his printing press at the sign of the Dove near to the church of St. John Maddermarket in Norwich. For several reasons it is not certain precisely how many books rolled off his press. At this time, books were often given false publishing details if they were of a sensitive, e.g. religious or scabrous nature. However, it is generally agreed that he printed at least five and possibly eight Dutch books. Among these are an edition of the psalm settings composed by Petrus Dathenus, a catechism and a confession of faith. These books would be used in the Dutch church in Norwich, which had several thousand members at this point. 

One Dutch book about which there has been less agreement is the first edition of Historie van B. Cornelis Adriaensen van Dordrecht, a satire on the misdeeds of a Friar Minor in Brugge. However, the late Karel Bostoen did a brilliant job in analyzing where the book might have been printed and came to the conclusion that although it was written in the Low Countries, it was printed in Norwich due to its scabrous anti-clerical content. 

There were four booksellers in the Dutch community in Norwich and at least one bookbinder, so there must have a thriving book trade in Norwich at this time. The question arises as to whether Solempne in fact had a licence to print. Printing was tightly controlled in this period and in general restricted to London and the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, so one is left to wonder if Solempne ran his printing press without the knowledge, or perhaps simply without the permission, of the authorities. We also do not know why he stopped printing in 1570. Perhaps there was no longer demand for his books. What we do know is that Solempne continued to operate in Norwich as a wine merchant. The books that he printed continued to be used for many years and add another chapter to the story of Dutch in England.

Further reading: 

Christopher Joby, The Dutch Language in Britain (1550-1702). Leiden, Brill, 2015

Karel Bostoen, 'Waar kwam de Historie van B. Cornelis (1569) van de pers? Het spoor terug naar de plaats van uitgave, boekverkoper en boekdrukker'. Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis 'Societe d'Emulation' te Brugge, 151, pp. 65-111.

Norwich Dutch - apocope - or the loss of a word-final vowel

The cloth hall (Lakenhal) in Ieper (Ypres), West Flanders

This and the following post will bring us to 50 posts and some 5000 page views for this blog, which I began to write in April 2018. To mark this, I return to the story of Dutch in my home town, Norwich. In previous blogs, I have discussed results from the analysis of the Norwich Ieper corpus, a set of letters written from Norwich by Flemish immigrants in the late 1560s. This post analyses apocope, the process whereby a suffix gradually weakens and eventually disappears from the end of a word. In Middle Dutch this process predominantly took place in two categories of word: the first person singular present indicative of the verb, for example ik neme (‘I take’) became ik neem after apocope; and feminine substantives, e.g., tonge (‘tongue’) became tong.

This post looks specifically at apocope, or more specifically schwa-apocope, for the first person singular present indicative. It divides this into two categories, those cases where there was inversion and those where there was no inversion. In cases of inversion where ic (‘I’) can be used as a clitic pronoun, the verb was already typically apocopated in Middle Dutch.  By contrast, where there was no inversion, the process of apocope occurred in varieties of Dutch at different times. For example, it was already underway in Hollands in the fourteenth century. However, in the Flemish dialect there is rather less evidence of apocope and in some cases the weak suffix remains in use to the present day. Marynissen draws similar conclusions about the diachronic regional variation for schwa-apocope, although her focus is more on apocope in nouns than verbs. She argues that apocope arose as a result of a tendency to avoid two unstressed syllables in favour of a trochaic pattern of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. For example, Middle Dutch camere (‘room’) shifted to camer.

In the Norwich Ieper corpus there are 127 tokens of the first person singular present indicative; 112 without inversion and fifteen with it. Of the 112 tokens without inversion, 65 (58%) do not demonstrate apocope. Of the remaining 47 tokens, 19 are modal verbs (wil, zal, moet, mach and vermach), and 28 other tokens do not exhibit a suffix, including 9 of the first person singular present indicative of the verb zijn (‘to be’) (although ic zal is a future marker, formally and syntactically it acts as a modal). If we remove modals and forms of zijn, 75% of first person singular present indicative verbs without inversion exhibit no apocope. So, we can conclude that there was a clear preference for no apocope among the authors of the Norwich Ieper corpus. This provides further evidence of the persistence of the lack of apocope in the first person singular present indicative in sixteenth-century varieties of Flemish.

As for the fifteen cases where there is inversion, four exhibit apocope: hebbick (letter 5); latic and hopic (28); and dinckick (44). The other eleven cases exhibit no apocope, e.g., gheve ick (letter 1), laete ick (45) and bidde ick (62). More evidence is required before any conclusions can be drawn about these cases.

Bibliography:

A. Marynissen: ‘Taalverandering tussen evolutie en normering: De e-apocope als breuklijn tussen het Nederlands en het Duits’, Nederlandse Taalkunde 14(1) (2009). p. 233-254.

C.M. van Kerckvoorde: An Introduction to Middle Dutch. Berlin, 1993.

Dutch and Hungarian

The Golden Coach (De Gouden Koets) on Prinsjesdag in September

There has been relatively little contact historically between Netherlands and Hungary, which may explain why there are relatively few Dutch loanwords in Hungarian (about 50) and only a handful of Hungarian loanwords in Dutch. The area where speakers of Hungarian are concentrated, i.e. modern day Hungary and parts of surrounding countries such as Romania, are some distance from the sea and so Hungarian has not incorporated some of the seafaring loanwords that many other languages have adopted. A couple of exceptions are jacht and matróz. Jacht ('Yacht') comes from the Dutch jachtboot. Hungarian also has jachtozó for yachtsman. Matróz comes from the Dutch matroos, sailor, possibly via another language. It forms many hybrid words in Hungarian such as matrózdal, a sea shanty (dal is Hungarian for song).

Nicoline van der Sijs notes that in the Middle Ages a sort of fabric called genti in Hungarian took its name from the town of Ghent in Flanders. In the wake of the Reformation, there was significant contact between Dutch and Hungarian Protestants. A Hungarian bible compiled by a team led by Gáspár Karolyi was printed in Amsterdam in 1590. Religious words such as Mennonita have been adopted by Hungarian. This comes from the Dutch Mennoniet, derived from the name of the leader of the Mennonites (a branch of Anabaptists), Menno Simonsz (1496-1561) from Friesland.

As for Hungarian words in Dutch, there are at least four. One of these, which has become an international loanword is koets ('coach'). This comes from the Hungarian word kosci, which derives from Kocs, the name of the village where the coach park for the Austro-Hungarian Emperor was situated. Another notable Hungarian loanword, again an international loanword is goulash. The authorative Dutch Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal tells us that this comes from the Hungarian gulyás, which is an abbreviation of gulyás hús `meat of the cattle herd'. This entered Dutch in the mid-19th century. A third example is paprika, from the Hungarian paprika, which was loaned from Serbo-Croat. A fourth example is huzaar (Eng. hussar) from the Hungarian huszár, referring to light cavalrymen. This was already in Dutch texts in the sixteenth century. All four words, koets, goulash (previously also spelt goulasch and goelasj), paprika and huzaar form hybrid words in Dutch. Koets forms over 20 hybrid words such as koetshuis (coach house) and koetspaard (coach horse) while 'uit de koets vallen' means 'to come down to earth with a bump'. In the Van Dale dictionary there is an entry for goulashcommunisme, which it defines as 'egoistic materialism'. Paprikapoeder and paprikasaus (powder and sauce) are two hybrid words in Dutch using paprika. Finally, there are several hybrids beginning with huzaar, such as huzarensalade, a salad with cold meat.

Further reading: Nicoline van der Sijs, Nederlandse woorden wereldwijd. The Hague: SDU, 2010.

Code switching in the Dutch East Indies

Batavia City Hall, now in the Old Town (Kota Tua) of Jakarta

When speakers of one language encounter those of another, they often insert words of the other language into their own. This is called code switching. They may do this for a number of reasons. One of these is that they lack a word to describe a new thing or idea they encounter or because the new language has more prestige than their own. When the Dutch began trading with people in East Asia, they encountered many new things, such as goods, types of ship, coins and units of measure, to name but a few. The Dutch were prodigious record keepers, noting down almost everything that happened at their trading posts on Java, in Taiwan, on Kyushu, Japan and elsewhere in dagregisters, or factory journals. These facts mean that the Dutch language in these journals is full of code switching. A recent project on the factory journals kept at Batavia, the centre of Dutch trading activities in the East Indies, gives a sense of the number of non-Dutch words inserted into the Dutch texts.

In one or two cases, the words are of Portuguese origin, such as pancado, a fixed price for raw silk. There are also Arabic and Persian words. The Arabic coin کبير (from the Arabic for 'big') and Persian gīlān ( گيلان ), a type of silk, are two examples, reminding us that the Dutch trading network spread to the Middle East. From the Indonesian archipelago we find words such as the Malay gantang, a unit of weight, and the Javanese demang, a district chief.
Several forms of Chinese are used in Dutch texts. The Mandarin huáng chuán (艎舡), a type of large boat, is often given in a Malay form, wankang. Cantonese is represented with sum, a type of ginseng and Hokkein with the word for 'tea'  tê (茶), which has given rise to most European words for tea, with a couple of exceptions such as Portuguese chá (from Mandarin) and Polish herbata. Japanese coins such as the ichibu (一分) are mentioned in the Dutch records and Hindi words such as kāch (काछ), a type of cloth are also used in cases of code switching.

Clearly, these texts are still Dutch, although the vocabulary is very different from that being used in the Low Countries. We might call this form of Dutch used in East Asia a regiolect, or thalassolect (sea language) or perhaps emporiolect (a trading language). However, whatever we call it, what the above underlines is the diversity of the history of Dutch. In this regard, it may be better to talk, along with Peter Burke, of Dutches than one Dutch language.

Further reading:

Lohanda, Mona, et al., VOC Glossary Indonesia, Published Version 1.0 on February, 6th 2018.

Gazette van Detroit and Emigrant Dutch

Printing is an important means by which migrant communities can keep their language alive. In sixteenth-century Norwich, the Brabander Anthonie de Solempne operated a press for several years, printing psalters and liturgical books for use in the Dutch language church. Solempne will be the subject of a future post on this blog.

Printing also played a role in supporting the use of Dutch among the tens of thousands of Dutch and Flemish who emigrated to the United States and Canada in the nineteenth century for religious and economic reasons. Roland Willemyns records that the first Dutch-language newspaper begun by the immigrants was the Sheboygan Nieuwsbode in 1849. By the outbreak of WWI in 1914 there were 25 Dutch-language newspapers and periodicals in the United States. In that year the Gazette van Detroit was founded as a Dutch-language newspaper for Flemish car workers in Michigan. Over time, as migrants shifted towards English, it became bilingual and went from being a daily to appearing twice weekly. Circulation numbers dwindled, but in 2006, funding from the Flemish government gave it a new breath of life online, using subscriptions as a source of income. However, by 2018, with subscriptions low and perhaps as well a reduction in readers who knew Dutch, the Gazette van Detroit has had to call it a day.

To judge from posts in Facebook groups such as 'Dutch Culture and Traditions', the descendants of emigrants still hold to some of the customs of the Low Countries. As to whether they keep alive the language in Michigan, or in other parts of the world to which Dutch and Flemish have migrated, this is one of the questions that the new Citizen Science project, 'Vertrokken Nederlands - Emigrant Dutch' hopes to answer. According to one scholar, migrants and their descendants continue to use the emigrant language for 6-8 generations, although this depends on factors such as the relative isolation of the migrant community and the dominant language in their adopted country. Whether the Dutch and Flemish are any different to other groups of migrants in this regard is a question that this project hopes to answer. 

Further reading and web resources:

Roland Willemyns, Dutch: Biography of a Language. Oxford: OUP, 2013, pp. 206-209.

http://www.gazettevandetroit.com/

Facebook group: 'Vertrokken Nederlands - Emigrant Dutch'

The influence of Dutch on Japanese grammar

Mt Fuji, which Dutch merchants would see on their journeys to Edo (Tokyo)

When one language comes into contact with another language, a number of things may happen. In some cases, pidgins emerge which subsequently become creoles. Some scholars have argued that Afrikaans was originally a creole that emerged from contact between Dutch and other languages, although more recently it has been suggested that Afrikaans is a creoloid, i.e. a language that resembles a creole, but did was not at first a pidgin. 
In other cases, several of which have been discussed in this blog, the languages borrow or loan words from each other. Many languages have Dutch loanwords, some of which such as schipper and baas have become internationalized loanwords, often adopted in their Anglicized forms, ‘skipper’ and ‘boss’. In a smaller number of cases, though, one language may influence the syntax of another language as a result of contact. It has been suggested, for example, that contact with Dutch spoken by migrants in Norwich in the sixteenth and seventeenth century led to a simplification of the local English dialectal present tense verb conjugation, which runs ‘I go’, ‘you go’, ‘he go’. However, archival evidence has cast doubt on this claim.

More promising is the influence of Dutch on Japanese syntax. This occurred mainly through the translation of over a thousand books from Dutch to Japanese in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Japanese and Dutch syntax are very different from each other, and Japanese translators occasionally found that their language lacked the grammar necessary to render adequately the Dutch source texts into Japanese. One example of a syntactic feature that arose in this way is the relative pronoun tokoro no (ところの). Old Japanese lacked relative pronouns (which, who etc.), so in order to translate relative pronouns in Dutch, translators borrowed tokoro no from kanbun, a form of classical Chinese used in Japan. Initially, it was only used as a direct object in relative clauses, but by the early nineteenth century it was also being used as the subject of relative clauses. For example from 1815, we find the following Japanese sentence translated from Dutch, where tokoro no (which) is the subject of the relative clause:

Kore    o          setsumei  suru  tokoro no bunpō      o    iu nari

                        This (DO)        explains           which     grammar (DO) refers to
   
                      “It refers to the grammar which explains this.”

Until the end of the Tokugawa period, the use of tokoro no was mainly limited to translations. However, thereafter (post-1868), it was used more broadly in Japanese speech and writing. I will discuss other influences of Dutch on Japanese syntax in later blogs.

Further reading:

Fumiko Earns, (1993) Language Adaptation: European language influence on Japanese syntax. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI.

Christopher Joby, (2016), 'Recording the History of Dutch in Japan,' Dutch Crossing 40(3), pp. 219-238.

Dutch and Polish

The Old Arsenal, Gdansk (reconstructed after WWII)

There has long been contact between the Low Countries and the area now within the boundaries of the Republic of Poland (Polish: Rzeczpospolita Polska). Gdańsk, or Danzig, was a Hanseatic port and so there was much commercial traffic between it and the Netherlands in the Late Middle Ages. One possibility is that several loanwords related to commerce, such as handel (trade) and kraan (crane) entered Polish at this time, although this is not certain. From handel we get other Polish words such as handlowy (commercial) and handlować (to trade).

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people from the Low Countries, in particular Mennonites, migrated to the area around Gdańsk and the marshy areas along the River Vistula (Wisła in Polish). Nowadays, 54 settlements have ‘holender’ or a variant thereof in their toponyms, a number which was much larger in the past. It is also reckoned that more than 4000 Poles have the surname, ‘Olender’. In Gdańsk itself, there was a Dutch community in the early modern period where a Reformed church community met for worship. Dutch technical skills were in demand. For example, Abraham van den Blocke, who was of Dutch descent, designed the imposing Golden Gate (Polish: Złota Brama) in the city centre. Along with Van den Blocke and a Polish architect, the Fleming Anthonis van Obbergen designed the city's Old Arsenal.

It is reckoned that there are at least 370 Dutch loanwords in Polish. However, some of these may derive from varieties of Low German (Nedersaksisch), spoken from the West of the Low Countries as far as present-day Western Poland, and used as a lingua franca in the Hanseatic League. Many of the Dutch loanwords in Polish, loaned directly or indirectly, relate to seafaring. These include harpun (harpoon), kielwater (ship’s wake), maszt (mast), szyper (skipper) and kooi (hammock). However, this is not the whole story. Other loan words not related to seafaring include lakmus (litmus) from the Dutch lakmoes and makler (broker) from the Dutch makelaar. In truth, however, it seems that although both Dutch and Polish are significant European languages, there is more work to be done on Dutch loanwords in Polish.

Further reading:

Nicoline van der Sijs, Nederlandse woorden wereldwijd. The Hague: SDU Uitgevers, 2010.

Barbara Czopek-Kopciuch, ‘Holendry and holender; the influence of Dutch immigrants on the Polish lexicon’. Lecture given on June 9th 2009 at the Meertens Instituut in Amsterdam. 

Additional material: Janek Urbaniak.

Negation in Norwich Dutch

St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich, which houses a wonderful Easter 

tapestry by Flemish weavers

Last month, I wrote a post about forms of address in Norwich Dutch (Norwichs Nederlands or Norwichs Vlaams). There I concluded we could tentatively talk of a Tu/Vos distinction in early modern Norwichs Nederlands. The dominant subject form of address in the letters written from Norwich to friends and family in Ieper in West Flanders (the Norwich Ieper corpus) was ghij. In this post, I return to those letters and discuss another linguistic feature that occurs quite frequently, namely negation in finite verb phrases.

In Old Dutch there was typically single negation, with the particles ne or en. This form of negation continued to be used in Middle Dutch in certain situations. However, by then negation was typically expressed by what some scholars refer to as ‘bipartite negation’, i.e., a two-part construction consisting of the negative particle ne or en before the finite verb and the negative adverb niet, e.g., ik en zie niet (‘I do not see’). In this construction niet is sometimes replaced by other words connoting the negative such as nooit (‘never’) and the article geen (‘not’/‘no’).

In Late Middle Dutch texts there is limited evidence for the use of niet, geen etc. on their own, e.g., Is Priamus niet dijn vader? (‘Is Priam not your father?’). In New Dutch (16th C. to present) this form gradually became more widespread until it emerged as the standard form of negation, although the shift towards the use of niet, geen etc. on their own happened at different times in the various parts of the Dutch language area. The Brieven als Buit (‘Letters as Loot’) project found that by the seventeenth century, bipartite negation was used in about half of all cases of negation in Zeeland and South Holland, whereas in North Holland it was only found in about a quarter of cases. However, in Amsterdam bipartite negation was used more frequently than elsewhere in North Holland. One possible reason for this is that there were many immigrants in the city from the Southern Netherlands, including Flanders, where bipartite negation continued to be used more often.

Of the 89 occurrences of negation in the Norwich Ieper corpus 76 (85%) involve bipartite negation. For example, in one letter (56) we read zoodat ic niet en vinde (‘so that I do not find’) and ghy ne soudt nemmermeer peinsen (‘you would nevermore think’). The other 13 tokens exhibit single negation, all using niet, geen etc. on their own. One construction that occurs on several occasions is ‘wilt niet + infinitive’ for the negative imperative, e.g., Wilt niet vergeten (‘Do not forget’) (16). This is probably a function of the fact that imperatives lost the second negation particle earlier than other constructions.

From this evidence we can tentatively conclude that bipartite negation was the dominant form of negation among Norwich Dutch authors at this time. As these were personal letters, we might also tentatively conclude that it was a form frequently heard on the streets of early modern Norwich. This result is in line with other studies which found that bipartite negation persisted longer in the Southern Netherlands than in the Northern Netherlands. However, as there are few surviving collections of personal letters written in West Flemish from this period, it is, I would suggest, a useful addition to existing scholarship on this subject.

Further reading:

J. van der Horst: Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse syntaxis. Leuven, 2008.

C.M. van Kerckvoorde, An Introduction to Middle Dutch. Berlin, 1993, esp. p. 97.

J.A. van Leuvensteijn et al. ‘Vroegnieuwnederlands’. In: M.C. van den Toorn et al. (ed.), Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Taal. Amsterdam, 1997, p, 334.

J. Nobels, (Extra)Ordinary letters: A view from below on seventeenth-century Dutch. Utrecht, 2013

G. Rutten and M. van der Wal, Letters As Loot: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch. Amsterdam, 2014