Chapter 5
The Linguistic Interest of the Bilingual Ordinances
As we have seen in the previous chapter, the Ordinances, devised and written by Dutch-speaking immigrants, are the earliest English-Dutch bilingual document. These exceptional circumstances give this text great curiosity value. In this chapter, we address three questions. The first concerns the exact relationship between the English and the Dutch: is one a translation of the other and, if not, what kind of relationship between the two should we envisage? The second question is: how well did these aliens acquit themselves in English? The third concerns the quality of their Dutch. Emigrants may, with time and disuse, lose some of their grip on their native language, and their second language may start to influence the way they use their first. The linguistic terms for these two processes are ‘language attrition’ and ‘interference’ (also known by the less pejorative term ‘cross-linguistic influence’) respectively.
1 For definitions and analyses of these processes, see Donald Winford, An Introduction to Contact Linguistics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). However, to characterise the languages of the Ordinances, it will not do to use only terms that emphasise loss and aberration. In fact, the term we need more than any other to describe their language is semantic and lexical innovation. As we shall see, the document contains various unattested words and spellings as well as several words that appear to occur here for the very first time in the English language.
Such linguistic innovation should not surprise us. As sociolinguists have shown, the movers and shakers of language and the initiators of linguistic change are people with ‘loose network ties’ – that is, language users who are not tied into a close-knit community but move across and between social networks.
2 See James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, ‘Linguistic Change, Social Network, and Speaker Innovation’, Journal of Linguistics 21 (1985), 339–84, and, with specific reference to medieval tradesmen, see the collection Merchants of Innovation: The Languages of Medieval Traders, ed. Esther Miriam-Wagner, Bettina Beinhoff and Ben Outhwaite (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2017). Skilled craftsmen in urban environments generally do, and did, have ‘loose network ties’. Some aspects of that social mobility are described in the statutes themselves: journeymen and apprentices ‘as well beyond the see as on this side’ (art. 1) joined workshops; members of the fraternity interacted with the Haberdashers, and if they did not sell their wares through them, they must have sold them directly to customers in London. Migrant communities that are plugged into other social networks are not usually backwards or defective in their language use. If anything, they tend to be ahead of the curve. The English text of the Ordinances provides a good test case.
The innovative quality of the Dutch in the Ordinances is harder to quantify. The existence of excellent historical dictionaries in English, the
Oxford English Dictionary (
OED) and the
Middle English Dictionary (
MED),
3 We have used the digital versions of MED <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary> and OED <https://www.oed.com>. makes it a worthwhile effort to collect (as we do below) unrecorded spellings and antedatings, and it is safe to draw some conclusions from these data. In Dutch, the historical dictionaries are too patchy to do this. Eelco Verwijs and Jakob Verdam, the original compilers of the Middle Dutch dictionary,
Het Middelnederlandsch Woordenboek (
MNW),
4 Digitised, along with a number of other historical Dutch dictionaries, at <https://gtb.ivdnt.org/search/>. made no systematic attempt to record spelling variants, and it must be left to experts in Middle Dutch to determine whether unrecorded forms are innovations or not. For instance, while one looks in vain for any other attestation of the spelling ‘ender’ for Modern Dutch
ander (art. 23)
in the corpus of digitised historical Dutch dictionaries,
5 <https://gtb.ivdnt.org/>. some digging in other corpora
shows that it cannot in fact have been as unusual as this might suggest. The corpus of fourteenth-century local records (Corpus van Reenen-Mulder) documents
enderhalf in an Antwerp charter of 1392,
6 <https://middelnederlands.nl/corpora/crm14/>. and a search in the digital library of Dutch literature also finds it in Jan van Ruusbroec’s
Vanden Gheesteliken Tabernakel.7 See Digital Library for Dutch Literature <http://www.dbnl.org/>. Given the rudimentary state of Middle Dutch lexicography, our contribution here must be rudimentary too: we aim to flag up any words or senses that are not in the Middle Dutch dictionary, and we will draw our conclusions about the nature of the language of these Dutch emigrés on that basis.