Golden Mean of Languages
Subtitle: Forging Dutch and French in the Early Modern Low Countries
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2019
Language: eng
Number of pages: 425
ISBN-13: 9789004355217
Subjects: Multilingualism; Languages in contact; Dutch language; French language; Europe, languages
Description: "In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French has been studied mainly from monolingual perspectives tracing the development towards modern Dutch or French. Van de Haar shows that the discussions on these languages were rooted in multilingual environments, in particular in French schools, Calvinist churches, printing houses, and chambers of rhetoric. The proposals that were formulated there to forge Dutch and French into useful forms were not directed solely at uniformization but were much more diverse"--