Linguist Peter-Alexander Kerkhof, together with Rotterdam archaeologists, made an animation film about the settlement Rotta in the year 1020 that went viral. In it you not only see how people lived at that time, but also hear how people spoke. How do you make such a reconstruction of language?
During the construction of the Rotterdam Market Hall in 2000, archaeologists made a special discovery:seven meters below street level were the remains of a 10 e century farmhouse. Together with a number of other farms, this formed the settlement of Rotta, located on the River Rotte. Rotterdam archaeologists made a reconstruction of the farm, which was given the name Rottahuis.
Two years ago, an animation film by the archaeologists came online, in which the viewer gets a picture of life on the settlement. Last month a new video was released, in which the language of a thousand years ago is also brought to life. This is the work of Peter-Alexander Kerkhof, a comparative linguist at Leiden University. But how do we actually know how people spoke then, since there are so few sources from that time?
Oldest Dutch
Few texts of the oldest Dutch have survived. The most famous phrase is still Hebban olla vogala, an 11th-century pen attempt by a Flemish monk. It is only not the oldest Dutch and also very short. From the 10 e and 11 e century, a number of longer texts have been handed down, such as the Wachtendonck Psalms (10 e century), and the Egmonde Williram (11 e century).
On the basis of those sources and separate text fragments, the Old Dutch Dictionary was compiled in 2009 by the Institute for the Dutch Language. Kerkhof used this dictionary to reconstruct the Rotta language. But he left the Williram – an Old Dutch translation of the Song of Songs – a bit to the left. “The spelling is very un-Dutch. You get the impression that the copyist was guided too much by the German example.”
It makes clear how difficult ancient sources can sometimes be to interpret. The Egmondse Williram is not only originally a German text, the copyist also came from Egmond, which was then in the Frisian language area. So there are not only German but also Frisian influences in it, and that makes it a bit of a mixed bag. According to Kerkhof, this is less true of the Wachtendonck Psalms. These texts are more in line with Old Dutch, which was a very different language from Old Frisian, which was also spoken in a large part of the Netherlands. Kerkhof:“Few people know that. This was also new for the archaeologists I worked with. Both Dutch and Frisian speakers lived along the river Maas. The Frisians in that area did not switch to Dutch until the 11th century.”
Sound laws as a guide
When we listen to Old Dutch as it must have sounded around 1020, a number of things stand out. In those days you still had full vowels in unstressed syllables:bitalon instead of "pay". “That sounds quite exotic to us now, because we lost that feature in Dutch 700 years ago. In syllables without stress you always hear a dull e, also called schwa. But in Sweden it is still preserved:there they say betala .”
If we listen to the consonants, it is noticeable that the d was still pronounced as th (thorp ) and the g was a soft g. But how do we know they sounded like that? To do this, comparative linguists work with 'language reconstructions':from words we know from contemporary languages, they reason back to older language phases on the basis of so-called sound laws. An example of such a sound law is the change that took place in the 12 e century Dutch, where all full vowels in unstressed syllables changed to a dull e. Similarly, the early Dutch th sound changed to a d sound during the same period. “We know that Old Dutch had a th sound because Old English and Old High German – members of the same Germanic language family – also had a th. Therefore we know that the th precedes the Dutch d. The th is preserved in English.”
Featured by the editors
MedicineWhat are the microplastics doing in my sunscreen?!
AstronomySun, sea and science
BiologyExpedition to melting land
Clues in spelling
Linguists find another clue for pronunciation in spelling. In sources such as the Wachtendonck Psalms you will always find the letter combination th in places where we now write a d. The same applies to the soft pronunciation of the g:in Old Dutch sources it is spelled both as g and j, says Kerkhof. “We find both the form giwerki if iewerki ('construction'). That variation can only be understood if you assume that a clerk or monk who had only the Latin alphabet at his disposal did not know exactly whether to write a g or a j."
Only the Old Dutch word order in the animation almost completely corresponds to the modern one. What's up with that? “Old Dutch still had many cases, which made the word order a lot more flexible than in later periods,” explains the linguist. You can therefore vary that, which is why Kerkhof has deliberately synchronized it with contemporary Dutch:“In the film people are shown double subtitles, and I thought it would be best for the experience if you could follow it word for word. . But it could have been even more exotic.”