Ypercorrection

Today I'll, for the first time in this blog, dedicate an entry to my Mother tongue. Of course I wouldn't ever do that if it didn't have any philological worth, so I will be discussing Old Dutch rather than modern Dutch.

Hebban Olla Vogala is often, falsely called 'the first Dutch text'. It is in a way the first Dutch text which has some literary value, although it's but a scribble to try out one's pen or a Probatio Pannae the text is as follows:

Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic andu thu. Uuat unbidan uue nu?
Which roughly translates to:
Have all birds begun nests except me and you. What are we waiting for?

Assuming that this text is in fact a Dutch text (it has been argued that this is in fact an Old English text), there are some striking things about this text which I wouldn't want to keep from you.

First it's the personal pronoun 'I' written hic. This spelling is one of the major reasons why we think that it might be a southern Dutch text (Flemish dialect).

The Dutch first person pronoun has been 'ik' for a very long time. It's been spelled ic, ick etc. But has always been /ik/. Therefore it's odd that one would write an h in front of this word. hic is a form that is quite commonly seen in Flemish scriptures in Middle Dutch, along side other words getting an h that it should have.

This is becomes Flemish lost its word initial h. This is a tendency which is still seen today. Where I come from people still say ebbe rather than hebben. In Middle Dutch times, the different Dutch speaking peoples were clearly aware of different dialectal regions. Therefore Flemish writers would often write an h in the place they new where it was present in other dialects. But very often, due to hypercorrection this h would show up in all sorts of words which are not supposed to have it. This looks exactly like such an instance.

But what is fascinating about this hypercorrection that we're no talking Middle Dutch  here but Old Dutch. Old Dutch was a language which has next to no written attestations, and was not really used as a written language except for Probatio Pennae and glosses of Latin texts. But a hypercorrection of hic, clearly points towards to some kind of uniformity of spelling of Dutch, which our anonymous poet was trying to conform to.

This truly goes against our expectations of the state of the Old Dutch language as a written one. If the person was truly a Flemish speaking writer we'd expect the text to be:
Ebban olla vogala nestas agunnan inase ic andu thu. Uuat unbidan uue nu?

It's quite mysterious. It, in my opinion, indicates that there may have been a more lively written tradition of Old Dutch then we currently think.

Another interesting thing I'd like to touch upon is another personal pronoun thu. This clearly is the reflex of the Proto-Germanic *þū as still seen today in the German du.

This is not the word we find in our modern speech. These days we have jij  which is actually a palatalised form of gij. Palatalisation in Dutch?! Yes, it's very rare, but it happens if there's enough North-Sea Germanic influence which did palatalise consonants.

But back to thu. It's interesting to see that Old Dutch still had þ, or maybe ð as a phoneme which becomes d in Middle Dutch. It's especially odd, because the German shift þ>d is often placed around the 6th/7th Century, and you'd expect the Dutch development to be part of that same wave (after all Old Dutch/Old Saxon/Old High German form quite a linear Dialect Continuum.) Apparently þ > d was then a later development in Dutch.

That's all for now, I hoe you enjoyed this little bit of insight into the Old Dutch language.