Taal en Tongval - Volume 71, Issue 2, 2019

Multilingualism and modern language teaching in the 16th century: the interjection hola as a possible case of language contact in the Colloquia, et dictionariolum

In this paper, we explore the semantic-pragmatic functions of the interjection hola in the Dutch, French and Spanish versions of the Colloquia, et dictionariolum, printed in Antwerp, as a possible case of language contact. The Colloquia, et dictionariolum, first printed in the 16^th century, are parallel language textbooks designed for acquiring basic skills in up to eight languages. The first edition of the Colloquia was bilingual Dutch-French; Spanish was among the first languages added to the textbook. At the core of the textbook are dialogues related to everyday situations, such as shopping at the market or participating in a family dinner. Although these dialogues are commonly regarded as early sources of spoken forms of European languages, they are in fact instances of conversational mimesis i.e. they are representations of spoken language, intended for didactic purposes and, most importantly, adapted and translated over time by various authors.

In our case study, we analyse first (h)ola’s semantic-pragmatic function(s) from a contrastive perspective. Subsequently, we explore a possible case of semantic-pragmatic extension in Spanish due to language contact. Generally speaking, (h)ola can fulfil a requestive function in Dutch, French and Spanish (cf. typology by Poggi 2009), viz. it was used to attract someone’s attention, a function that can be attested for the three languages in the Colloquia. Moreover, the dialogues of the Colloquia provide an example for (h)ola in a requestive-cessative function, used to tell someone to stop or slow down. This function has been described for both Dutch and French hola (also in English and German) but has, up until now, not been attested for the Spanish counterpart. A first explorative analysis of hola in the 16^th-century Spanish CORDE-corpus does not yield any cessative occurrences either. Consequently, the cessative function of Spanish hola in the Colloquia might be due to the possible interference from Dutch or French (or both). However, in order to provide a more conclusive answer, a detailed study of the semantic-pragmatic functions of hola in the Germanic and Romance languages involved will be necessary.

‘Adieu, Vaarwel, groet mijne zo Waarde Ouders’: The usage of French loan suffixes and loan words in a nineteenth-century family correspondence

The French cultural hegemony in Europe over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries affected Dutch society. During the French period (1795-1813), the French influence on Dutch politics was significant as well. As a result, the Dutch language ‘frenchified’: many loan words and loan suffixes were borrowed from French. A corpus analysis of the family letters of the Bijleveld family from Leiden (1813-1814) reveals the extensive impact of French language contact. Especially in the letters of son Theodoor, who was sent to France in 1813 to serve for Napoleon’s Garde d’honneur (‘guard of honor’), the amount of loan suffixes is considerable. This result outnumbers the outcomes of the study by Rutten, Vosters and Van der Wal (2015) and shows that the language use of elite citizens was significantly influenced by French. A comparison between loan suffixes and loan words in the letter corpus reveals an even more compelling result: the relative frequency of loan words in the corpus is twice as high as the relative frequency of loan suffixes.

How Enlightenment eradicated a language: About the disappearance of Yiddish in the Netherlands

This study discusses the disappearance of Yiddish in the Netherlands. At the end of the 18^th century a small group of progressive Jews, inspired by the French Revolution and the ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment Haskalah, tried to implement changes in the Jewish community of Amsterdam. One of the innovations they proposed was giving up Yiddish in favor of Dutch. Their arguments were threefold: Yiddish was a corrupted language in which it was impossible to think clearly. Secondly, by using Yiddish the Jews isolated themselves, which led to their backwardness and poverty. Thirdly, by not mastering the national language, the Jews were unable to make full use of their newly acquired civil rights. The initiative of this small group of forerunners met with fierce resistance in the Jewish community. With the help of two successive kings, who sought centralization and the creation of a common national identity, the progressive liberal group finally gained victory. After about a century, it turned out that Yiddish had disappeared from the Netherlands.

Not only can monolingual histories mask multilingual practices, but writing languages out of history happens very differently even in the same time and place. We examine two cases in one historical setting, an Indigenous language and an immigrant language in Wisconsin (U.S.), Menominee and German. The widespread view of the United States today as an English monolingual state reflects an ongoing process of writing other languages out of history, or invisibilization. Menominee and German present sharply contrasting cases of this process and reactions to it from the late 19th century to the present. German, once widely taught, written and read in a standard variety, has lost that status as one piece of a broader political struggle and exists today basically as a ‘post-vernacular’ language. In contrast, Menominee faced ongoing, violent efforts to extirpate it, but is being revitalized by a new generation of speakers today.

Due to the 250-year status of their language as an oral language (but see below the reference to Georg Brandes [1888]) the only hard evidence we have just what the Doukhobors’ language was like, are the interviews conducted with Doukhobor elders in the 1960’s, i.e., those speakers who had brought the language with them in their mass migration to Canada in 1899. Some glimpses can also be gained by the study of their ritual texts (psalms, prayers, and hymns) that fortunately had been collected and written down in the early 20^th century by the Bolshevik Russian land surveyor in a book called Životnaja Kniga duxoborcev (Bonč-Bruevič, Vladimir. 1909 [1954].) There is a debate as to how the title of this book is best translated into English, The Book of Life or The Living Book. I believe that The Living Book currently has the edge. Before being collected and written down, this book was also oral, and much of the language reflected the spoken practice (Schaarschmidt 1995). At all times, the illiterate Doukhobors had access to members of their community that performed the written tasks for them, such as dealing with the bureaucracy of the Russian Empire. And because of their forced move from the Crimea to Transcaucasia, the Doukhobors’ previous exclusive contacts with South Russian now faced Russian-Turco-Tataric bilingualism. The latter can still be traced rather easily: of the ever decreasing number of elders in their seventies and up, many remember bits and pieces of Turco-Tartaric words and expressions that are published in a series of articles in the Doukhobor monthly Iskra by a former and now retired Russian-language teacher in the Doukhobor area of British Columbia (see, for example, Popoff 2013). In addition, many Doukhobor surnames show Turco-Tataric influence. What is often not so clear is whether the Turco-Tartaric words came into Standard Russian before the contact of Doukhobor Russian with Turco-Tartaric, and it is our role as etymologists to determine that on the basis of multi-volume dialect dictionaries or field work in the still extant Doukhobor oral language area within Georgia. For any moribund language that in the past had multiple functions there arises the question of the relationship between language death and the preservation of culture, a largely unresolved issue in sociolinguistics. On the one hand, there are cases of large-scale language loss with the retention of at least some elements of culture (to wit, Ukrainian in Canada, Sorbian in Germany, many First Nations in North America, and, as will be demonstrated in the present research article, Doukhobor Russian in Canada and Georgia). The present paper will deal with a small subtopic in this large field, i.e., the loss of “special” languages, such as the “ritual language” as used by the Doukhobors as well as their oral language that they brought with them to Canada in 1899 and that was partially recorded by linguists, such as Harshenin (1961; 1964; 1967).

Late medieval Sweden was a multilingual society. At least three languages – namely Old Swedish, Low German, and Latin – were in use, beside other regional languages. While the influence of Low German is easily detectable in all parts of the Swedish language system and has been investigated rather thoroughly from a historical sociolinguistic point of view (cf. Braunmüller 2004), the role of Latin has been rather marginalized in traditional Swedish language historiography, focusing on the earlier stages of Old Swedish, which are described as its classical form (cf. Pettersson 2005). Starting out as the language of religion, administration, diplomacy and, to some extent, trade, Latin was the dominant language of text production in Sweden until the 14th century, which saw Written Old Swedish gain some domains as well, resulting in a more balanced diglossic relation between the two languages. The emerging written variety of Swedish, however, was heavily influenced by the multilingual practices of scribes, in large part clerics who were used to using at least Swedish and Latin on a daily basis for a variety of communicative purposes (Höder 2010). These multilingual practices, ranging from ad hoc translations via code-switching to the application of Latin stylistic, textual, and syntactic norms in Swedish text production (Höder 2018), had a lasting impact on the later development of a Swedish proto-standard, and are still reflected in conservative text types today. This contribution approaches this development from a historical sociolinguistic and contact linguistic perspective, concentrating on the establishment of multilingual practices.