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 corpus leads to a hypothesis about the regional distribution of this phenomenon and reveals a possible connection with the German or Scandinavian background of particular scribes.

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 new functions as plural ending and prosodic element. This sketch suggests that the decline of the case system was the main factor in the development of the linking elements. We argue against this view. The loss of case does not overtly correlate with the increase of linking elements. Furthermore, already in Middle-Dutch, the linking element had a prosodic function. The loss of case can only partly account for the spread of linking elements. We hypothesize that an equally important factor is the presence of head-initial stress, which also set in motion the decay of the case system. The erratic distribution of the linking elements is the result of an interplay between phonology, morphology and semantics.