#Sooey pig etymology manuals#

5 In New Netherland a special pronunciation of the word butter was in use, namely botter. My first case is not specifically agricultural, it is the word “butter.” All variants of the word butter, including the English form, descend from the Latin word butyrum. Changes may have occurred in the language’s geographical situation since the seventeenth century, although I do not think that agricultural terminology has changed very much, because farming is by definition, traditional. Caution or some “wiggle room” is required because I use dialect maps from the twentieth century. If one can determine where such a word originated, one can cautiously dare to conclude that the word in New Netherland came from that region. This offers opportunities to determine where the speaker of a certain word came from. Some of these terms appear throughout the Dutch language area: hengst (“stallion”), merry (“mare”), geyten (“goats”), varckens (“pigs”), schapen (“sheep”), rogge (“rye”), garst (“barley”), mays (“corn”), erreten (“peas”), zicht (“sight”), and so on.Ī number of words only occur in a certain part of the Dutch language area. 4 Because the farmer’s terms, of course, emigrated with the settlers, they are the same as those used in old Netherlands. This article explores the linguistic variety of a small number of agricultural terms found in the 1638–16–1652 Register of the Provincial Secretary.Īccording to Jacobs, the colonials or colonizers, especially the farmers, came mostly from the poor provinces of Gelderland, Drenthe, and Overijssel. 3 This variety is reflected in the Register of the Provincial Secretary, opening up an interesting linguistic perspective on the regional origins of the New Netherland colonists and their language. Examples are merrie and marry paert (“mare”), coebeest and coybeest (“cow”), and sug, soch, and seug (“sow”), each with different vowels. In contrast, the agricultural terminology shows a considerable regional variety within the seven Dutch provinces. The official written Dutch language as used by officials like Van Tienhoven was uniform over all the Dutch Republic. And that’s where it gets linguistically interesting. 2 For the Provincial Register see The provinces of the Netherlands.īouwerij (“farm”) and its various animals and implements, he most likely recorded the agricultural terminology used by the farmers appearing before him. When, for example, drawing up an inventory of aġ Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden, 2004) Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (New York, London, 2004). But Van Tienhoven was a bookkeeper and administrator, not a farmer.

#Sooey pig etymology manuals#

For the most part, this is boilerplate legalese, drawn from manuals for notaries.

Van Tienhoven employed the “official,” written Dutch which was commonly used in the Dutch Republic. Most of these documents were drawn up by Cornelis van Tienhoven, provincial secretary from 1638 to 16 to 1652. While the contents of the Register of the Provincial Secretary have been widely used by historians, the actual language in which the documents are written has not received much scholarly attention. His articles appear regularly on the blog /. In 2010 he published Hun hebben de taal verkwanseld: over Poldernederlands, fout Nederlands en ABN, about wrong and so-called “wrong” Dutch. He wrote a book about it and composed the website Poldernederlands. Stroop is known for his discovery in 1997 of Poldernederlands, a popular new variant of the Dutch standard language. In 1977 he became a senior fellow in the Dutch linguistics department of the University of Amsterdam. From 1966 to 1974 he was employed by the Meertens Institute, a research institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. Together these provide ample information about farming, households, environment, people, quarrels, and so on, and are a rich source for the economic and social life of the colonists. They contain a wide range of documents, including depositions, contracts, estate inventories, leases, deeds, wills, bonds, powers of attorney, and other private instruments. The first three volumes in this collection comprise the Register of the Provincial Secretary. 1 Both authors made extensive use of the collection of Dutch-language colonial manuscripts housed at the New York State Archives in Albany. Prime examples are The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto and New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America by Jaap Jacobs. THE ORIGIN ANDdevelopment of the Dutch colony of New Netherland is covered in a number of historical publications. The Origins of New Netherland Agricultural Terminology by Jan Stroop