Atlas van Vroegmiddelnederlandse taalvarianten

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Summary

Aim of this Atlas van Vroegmiddelnederlandse Taalvarianten (AVT; Atlas of Early Middle Dutch Linguistic Variants) was to describe and visualize the geographic distribution of linguistic phenomena in 13th century Dutch, both for the benefit of linguistic research as well as on behalf of literary-historical research, especially concerning the localization of literary texts. This was done on the basis of documents of which the place of origin could be determined on non-linguistic grounds, such as the place of residence of the institution that ordered or produced the recording. This is mainly the case with official documents, all of which were - as far as they were written in Dutch - published in Gysseling 1977a. With respect to the restriction mentioned (the limitation to objectively localized documents) there is a difference with Berteloots' Bijdrage tot een klankatlas van het dertiende-eeuwse Middelnederlands (Contribution to a Phonological Atlas of 13th Century Middle Dutch) (Berteloot 1984b): this atlas includes a number of documents localized by Gysseling on linguistic criteria. The AVT also offers a considerable quantitative addition to Berteloots vowel maps, and it contains maps on morphological and lexical items. In relation to the Vroegmiddelnederlands Woordenboek (VMNW; Dictionary of Early Middle Dutch), which has been produced from 1989 onwards and in which regional variants of words are mentioned as well, the AVT's display of the relative frequencies of a part of those variants (which are more relevant than the absolute frequencies), and the publication of illustrative maps of the geographical distribution is of importance. The above-mentioned remarks are made in the general introduction offered in chapter 1, while in the chapters 2-5 methodological and technical questions are discussed. Chapter 6 forms the central part with 160 maps and comments.

In chapter 2 it is explained on what criteria a written document (such as a charter, a roll of tenures or citizens, or a statue) is determined to have been produced in a certain place, and thus to reflect the local dialect. Some of the documents had to be excluded of the investigation because the place of origin was unknown. None of the literary texts could be localized on non-linguistic grounds. On the other hand, a couple of 13th century documents not published in Gysseling 1977a, and some of them being recently discovered, were added to our corpus.

Chapter 3 deals with the way of selecting and counting the data. The places of origin were clustered into 56 measure points, which together form the 11 regions shown on the maps. For each document produced by those measure points, only one attestation of a certain linguistic phenomena is counted. The data for 252 linguistic items are published in tabulas (see appendix 2) for each measure point, while the percentages of the frequencies in 11 regions is shown on the maps.

The carthographic method chosen for the AVT is compared to those of other, comparable historical-linguistic atlasses in chapter 4. It is argued that for our goal an easily legible map is to be preferred to maps on which both local differences in relative frequency of certain items and the number of documents provided by the various places are shown. The division of the AVT-map

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formally is one into geographic unities, but is also connected to the traditional division into main dialects. At the end the results of a statistical analysis of our data are given: they show the amount of similarity between the 56 places (or clusters of places) into which we divided the places of origin of our documents.

In chapter 5 one of the possible applications of a linguistic atlas is discussed: the localization of 13th century Middle Dutch manuscripts with unknown origin. Both literary texts (Maerlant's Der Naturen Bloeme and Rijmbijbel) and non-literary, official documents are investigated. At first the linguistic characteristics of each of those texts were compared to those documented on our maps. With respect to the literary texts, special attention was given to rhyme words, as these are (for a great part) supposed to be unchangeable; i.e., in principle the copiist could not translate the original form into his own dialect without spoiling the rhyme couples. Rhymes thus form an indication of the author himself. To the (traditional) comparison a statistical analysis was added. This too measured the similarity of the linguistic forms in the texts to be localized with the items in the AVT. The overall conclusion of this comparison was that the language of the Maerlant manuscripts is more oriented to the language of Flanders-Zeeland than to Holland; while the rhyme words also contain Hollandic and Brabantic forms, probably used by the author in order to increase his quantity of rhyme words. As far as the charters are concerned, Gysselings localization was for the main part confirmed, though one of the three charters had more Hollandic characteristics than was noticed before.

In chapter 6 the maps are given, concerning phonological items (vowels, consonants and spelling phenomena), and morphological and lexicographical items respectively. Each map, or series of maps on the same subject, is discussed with respect to the distribution of linguistic characteristics, the linguistic problem itself, the behaviour of the scribes, the relation to other maps, and so on.

The overall picture of those 160 maps offers some interesting information. Concluding remarks on the maps, and others on the method of research and representation are made in chapter 7.

As far as methodological questions are concerned, the method chosen, both concerning the collection and analysis of the data and the representation on the rather simplified, easily legible maps proved to be satisfying. The information on the distribution of linguistic items can easily be obtained from these (interpreting) maps, while the objective and more detailed data are at the same time kept available for background information and further research.