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1. Introduction. Fascinating Multilingualism This post-print includes the introduction, chapter 4 and the conclusion of the book ‘van de Haar, A. (2019). The Golden Mean of Languages. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.’ The publication is uploaded with permission of Brill. More information on the book is available at https://brill.com/view/title/35813. 1. Introduction. Fascinating Multilingualism 1.1. Introduction The year 1546 constitutes a pivotal moment in the history of the Dutch language. It was in this year that Ghent schoolmaster and printer Joos Lambrecht published his Naembouck. Not only was this the first alphabetically ordered dictionary with a variant of Dutch as its source language, it is also considered to be the first purist dictionary of this vernacular. As such, the Naembouck is part of a sixteenth-century trend in the Low Countries, that focused on the rejection of foreign—usually French or Latin—loanwords. Needless to say, no historical overview of the Dutch tongue fails to mention this work. However, rather than a monolingual feat focused solely on the promotion of Dutch, the Naembouck is a Dutch-French dictionary designed for the instruction of the latter tongue. Moreover, Lambrecht used a new way of spelling both Dutch and French words that was strongly inspired by French orthographical treatises. The Naembouck is not a product of simple veneration of Dutch, but of an inquisitive mind interested in the languages he encountered in his everyday life. The sixteenth-century Low Countries were, indeed, fundamentally multilingual. While Latin continued to be an important player in the interregional, scholarly, and religious fields, the vernacular realm saw Dutch and French dialects in constant contact. Although French was the native tongue in a smaller geographic region, it played an important role as an aristocratic, administrative, judicial, and interregional language in the Dutch-speaking areas. Lambrecht, as both a teacher of French and a printer in the city of Ghent, was confronted with this situation on a daily basis. It was in this context that he, along with many others, started thinking about the local languages of his region. From the 1540s onwards, this culminated in intense reflections on the status of Dutch and French and on the form in which they should be forged in order to reach a golden mean that was understandable to everyone. 1 Illustration, Purification, Construction, Standardization The sixteenth century was marked by the production of a large number of dictionaries, orthographical treatises, and grammars of many of the languages of Europe. Everywhere, people were fascinated with language. While many observations on classical and exotic languages, such as Persian, were written down, a great deal of work was done on the local vernaculars as well.1 Scholars interested in this early modern language fascination have largely approached the topic from the point of view of one particular language. Such an initial monolingual approach was stimulated in part by the fragmentation of language departments at universities that has existed since the nineteenth century. Moreover, well-defined studies were needed to lay a solid foundation before further comparative and cross-over research could be undertaken. However, to this day, only one monograph, written in the 1950s, deals with the early-modern discussions about the vernacular which took place in the Low Countries: Lode Van den Branden’s Het streven naar verheerlijking, zuivering en opbouw van het Nederlands in de 16e eeuw.2 While he deserves praise for identifying large quantities of sources dealing with the Dutch language, Van den Branden’s interpretations were, congruent with the contemporary research paradigm, guided by a teleological focus, trying to reveal how the Dutch language of his own time had come into being. He summarized the versatile discussions on language in the sixteenth-century Low Countries through the triptych of ‘illustration, purification, and construction of Dutch’ also mentioned in his title. The manifold reflections have thus been reduced to three strands which were, indeed, strongly present. The first term, ‘illustration’ (‘verheerlijking’), receives no explanation by Van den Branden, but seems to target the same sense as Joachim Du Bellay’s 1549 manifesto on the French vernacular, La deffence, et illvstration de la Langue Francoyse.3 ‘Illustration’ in this context signifies rendering something—in this case, language—illustrious. ‘Purification’ (‘zuivering’) is the call for an exclusion of loanwords from other languages.4 ‘Construction’ (‘opbouw’), lastly, targets the 1 The Persian language was discussed by humanists, such as Franciscus Raphelengius and Justus Lipsius. T. Van Hal, ‘The Earliest Stages of Persian-German Language Comparison’. In G. Hassler (Ed.), History of Linguistics 2008: Selected Papers from the 11th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011). See: Chapter 3.3. 2 The Pursuit of Illustration, Purification, and Construction of Dutch in the 16th Century. L. Van den Branden, Het streven naar verheerlijking, zuivering en opbouw van het Nederlands in de 16e eeuw (Arnhem: Gijsbers & Van Loon, 1967). An earlier edition of this book appeared in 1956. 3 J. Du Bellay, La deffence, et illvstration de la Langue Francoyse (Paris: Arnoul l’Angelier, 1549). I am grateful to Peter Burke for this suggestion. 4 Van den Branden’s definition of purification is a narrow one, focusing on loanwords alone and not on the exclusion of unwanted elements in general. For the different possible definitions of the term ‘purism’, see: N. Langer & W. Davies, ‘An Introduction to Linguistic Purism’. In N. Langer & W. Davies (Eds.), Linguistic Purism 2 creation of a standard, regularized, and uniform language that is suitable for any speech domain, be it literary or scholarly.5 Van den Branden’s tripartite view, which is often repeated in more recent studies, indeed represents a considerable part of the opinions that were put forward by sixteenth-century language debaters.6 Many individuals praised Dutch, called for a rejection of words that had been borrowed from French and Latin, and proposed certain rules. Contemporaries also proposed, nevertheless, a range of nuanced viewpoints and contradicting statements that do not fit Van den Branden’s three main topics. The Dutch language was not moving in such a clear direction as it might have seemed. Furthermore, the general fascination with language and wish to develop the vernacular which was prevalent at that time expressed itself in many more ways—for instance, as enquiries into the differences between languages, their particular characteristics, their histories, and so on. Moreover, there was a broad interest in languages other than Dutch: some inhabitants of the Low Countries, including native speakers of Dutch, also praised French and designed rules for its use. Van den Branden had a particular focus on calls for purification, highlighting the earliest authors who spoke out against loanwords but leaving out those who defended them, since they represented the norm.7 This led to the common misconception among scholars after Van den Branden that the anti-loanword movement was widely supported and knew little resistance. Marco Prandoni, for instance, assumed that the sixteenth-century Low Countries knew an ‘obsession of purity’ or even ‘an anti-French crusade in language’.8 These are overstatements: most language debaters had a nuanced opinion on loanwords, accepting them under certain conditions. Furthermore, many of those who supported borrowing explained their position with argumentations that reveal a conscious reflection on the nature of their mother tongue and a wish to develop Dutch. Because he did not count defences of borrowing as attempts to support in the Germanic Languages (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 3-4; N. Langer & A. Nesse, ‘Linguistic Purism’. In J. M. Hernández-Campoy & J. C. Conde-Silvestre (Eds.), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 608. 5 Van den Branden, Het streven naar verheerlijking. 6 See, for instance: M. J. van der Wal & C. van Bree, Geschiedenis van het Nederlands, fifth edition, (Houten: Spectrum, 2008), 186, 191, 195; J. Jansen, ‘“Sincere Simplicity”: Gerbrand Bredero’s Apprenticeship with Coornhert and Spiegel’. Dutch Crossing, 41, 1 (2017), 6. 7 Various monographs have been devoted to the issue of loanwords in European languages. See, for instance: J. J. Salverda de Grave, De Franse woorden in het Nederlands (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1920); N. van der Sijs, Leenwoordenboek: De invloed van andere talen op het Nederlands (The Hague: Sdu Uitgevers, 1996); P. Durkin. Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 8 M. Prandoni, ‘Vive la France, à bas la France ! Contradictory Attitude Toward the Appropriation of French Cultural Elements in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century: The Forewords of “Modern” Poetry Collections’. In B. Noak (Ed.), Wissenstransfer und Auctoritas in der frühneuzeitlichen niederländischsprachigen Literatur (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2014), 188, 191. 3 Dutch, Van den Branden equated only purification with construction. This presents a problematic contradiction in his work. Wishing to contextualize his findings, Van den Branden pointed out three major supposed causes of the debates: Renaissance, humanism, and patriotism.9 There is a grain of truth in this presentation of events, but it requires some complementary
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