Niederlandistik und Germanistik im Kontakt. Jelle Stegeman zum abschied ed. by Elvira Glaser and Marja Clement (review)

A symposium on the 15th of December, 2010, honoring Professor Jelle Stegeman (Zürich) on his retirement provides the impetus for this volume highlighting the mutual importance of the linguistic and cultural history of German and Dutch to scholars of both languages. While this thematic focus may seem mundane, it is important to realize that anachronistic imposition of the borders of modern nation-states has led to an unjustifiable narrowing of the research scope of Germanists and Netherlandicists alike. The eight contributions in this volume (eight in German, one in Dutch) demonstrate that consideration of the linguistic and cultural history of the entire Continental West Germanic dialect continuum can yield rich insights into the history of German and Dutch.

Stefan Sonderegger provides the first contribution, “Niederländisch-Schweizerisch Berührungen um die Anfänge einer germanischen Philologie im 16. Jahrhundert,” a fascinating account of the network of humanist scholars working in Basel, Glarus, Brugge, Leuven, Cologne, Flanders, and Antwerp at the dawn of the intense study of older languages in the context of Biblical philology. Two keys figure in this network were the contemporaries Erasmus (1469–1536), a Hollander who lived and worked in Basel late in his life, and the Alsatian humanist Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547). Sonderegger lays all of this out concisely and provides a useful graphic illustrating this network of humanist scholars. Things get really interesting, however, when the author zeroes in on one aspect of the more general Biblical philology and its stimulation of interest in ancient languages when he traces and compares versions of the decipherment of the Lord’s prayer in the Gothic Codex Argenteus by the southern Dutch humanists Becanus (1569) and Vulcanus (1597) as well as a version by the Glarner Tschudi (1572). The direct comparison of these first sixteenth-century attempts to decode Gothic provide insight into the difficulties these scholars faced and the ingenuity they brought to the study of newly (re)discovered ancient languages.

Jelle Stegeman is not only celebrated in this volume; he also provides interesting perspectives on the study of the history of Dutch in his contribution “Niederländisch Sprache als Gegenstand der Geschichtsschreibung.” Stegeman is particularly sensitive to an unfortunate tendency in Dutch historical linguistics to treat earlier stages of the language as stepping stones leading teleologically to the development of standard Dutch (Algemeen Nederlands). Instead, Stegeman encourages scholars to consider earlier periods in the history of Dutch in their own context, since the modern concept “Dutch” is of relatively recent currency and would have meant nothing to speakers in earlier eras. Working through various periods of the history of Dutch, Stegeman outlines the scope (“Größen”) of the internal and external history of Dutch. A constant theme throughout is that the history of a language must also be a history of its speakers.

In “Frühgeschichte und Sprachgeschichte in den Niederlanden,” Ludwig Rübekeil argues that in late Antiquity the Low Countries were an important site of language and cultural contact among the various West Germanic people and the late Roman Empire, and, later, the Merovingian Empire. He first provides an up-to-date overview of the demographic history of the Low Countries from late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. He then delivers a careful analysis of two recently discovered Frankish runic inscriptions that show evidence of influence from Latin orthography, which in turn supports his basic thesis that the Low Countries were a melting pot and a center of innovation in the first six centuries of the Christian Era. With this detailed analysis of two short runic inscriptions, Rübekeil underscores his basic premise that the Low Countries were a center of interculture contact and innovation in late Antiquity and in the early Middle Ages.

In “Zum diachronen Verhalten von Diphthongen in einigen germanischen Sprachen,” Luzius Thöny tackles the question of whether diphthongs in Germanic...