Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - Volume 135, Issue 3, 2019

In the recent past a number of contributions have been published on the subject of Dutch seem and appear verbs. Special attention has been paid to the third person simple present of schijnt (‘seems’) in spoken Belgian and to some extent also in spoken Netherlandic Dutch (Van Bogaert & Colleman 2013). The authors propose a two way strategy – parataxis hypothesis and matrix hypothesis – in order to account for the realisations and positions of schijnt as in ’t schijnt sterven daar veel talen af (‘it seems many languages are expire there’) and … ze hebben – zo schijnt het – geen middelen … (they don’t have – as it seems – any means). However, it is argued here that the evidence for the matrix hypothesis is weak. As an alternative a derivation from the in spoken Belgian Dutch comparatively frequent construction naar het schijnt will be proposed.

This is a brief reply to the article by Vliegen in this issue. We argue that, while Vliegen’s suggestion of a link between naar het schijnt and (’t) schijnt is certainly plausible, this need not rule out a scenario in which the emerging use of (’t) schijnt as a particle has also taken its root in (specific uses of) the matrix clause construction het schijnt dat. In modern construction-based approaches to language change, it is accepted that newly developing constructions may have multiple sources. In this perspective, the ‘matrix clause hypothesis’ and the ‘paratactic hypothesis’ are not mutually exclusive.

Various eighteenth-century works discussed the language of Dutch pie-tists. This article analyses how those works represented the pietistic language and to what extent the sources overlap regarding the representation of the pietistic lan-guage. There is indeed conformity between the sources. The overlap in represen-tation between the works Kralingiana and Historie van mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart is most striking. However, the pietistic language is also represented in slightly different ways in Sara Burgerhart. An important question for future research is how the eighteenth-century representation of Dutch pietistic use of language cor-responded to the actual eighteenth-century pietistic use of language.

This article deals with a hitherto unknown poem by Joost van den Von-del. The poem, written by Vondel to comfort Ursula vanden Bergen on the death of her eight-year-old daughter Geertruidt Hinloopen Vermaes, was discovered in a family archive. This consolation poem fits perfectly in the oeuvre of the elder Roman Catholic poet and sheds light upon his relation with the prominent Am-sterdam family Hinloopen.

The public library of Valenza, in the Italian region of Piedmont, holds two parchment fragments of Jacob van Maerlant’s Spiegel historiael which are used to protect other documents. The present paper is the first study dedicated to them. The leaves are first described separately, highlighting their shape as well as the text which has been handed down to us. Taking into account paleographical, ortho-graphical and linguistic aspects, the author tries to reconstruct the original manu-script from which both fragments derive, reaching the conclusion that it was writ-ten in the first quarter of the 14th century in the area of (South-)Eastern Flanders or Western Brabant. Furthermore, special attention is paid to the hypothesis that the fragments reached Piedmont because of the strong presence in the Low Countries of Italian money lenders, the so called ‘Lombards’, who came exactly from that re-gion. The complete edition of the Middle Dutch text, followed by notes, concludes the study.