Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2011

In this article, we examine two ways of spelling the reduced vowel in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letters and their possible link with its palatal pronunciation proposed by Caron. Contrary to claims made by Gaspar (2007), we show that the so-called invisible spelling should not always be straightforwardly interpreted as a reflection of a palatal sound. In the case of the double spelling an analysis of our sailing letters cor Read More

The distribution of linking elements in Dutch nominal compounds seems erratic at first glance. The literature attributes this to the origin of the linking elements as case markers. When the decay of the case system set in, these markers were retained in compounds but gradually lost their meaning. This allowed the case markers to spread to compounds with a paradigmatically incongruous first element and to acquire their Read More