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Document Details :

Title: Taalkunde in de Helicon
Author(s): DIBBETS, Geert R.W.
Journal: Spiegel der Letteren
Volume: 43    Issue: 2   Date: 2001   
Pages: 87-100
DOI: 10.2143/SDL.43.2.394

Abstract :
In the early part of the seventeenth century, refugee poets from the southern Dutch provinces in Haarlem and Leiden met each other in the so-called ‘Flemish’ or ‘Brabantine’ chambers of rhetoric. Together, ‘De Witte Angieren’ from Haarlem and ‘De Oranje Lelie’ from Leiden published Den Nederduytschen Helicon (1610). In this collection of poetical works the rhetoricians paid modest attention to linguistic aspects of the Dutch language: purism and grammar. The present essay aims to demonstrate the influence of the first printed grammar of Dutch — the Amsterdam Twe-spraack vande Nederduitsche Letterkunst (1584) —, as well as of the observations about the Dutch by the late Karel van Mander, who hailed from the South but spent a large part of his life in the North. Above all, this article aims to underline the fact that a number of the refugees from the southern provinces showed a particular concern for the mother tongue.

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