Dutch spelling...

Those of you who either don’t know me or haven’t read my introductory post don’t know that I’m a Belgian student majoring in languages. One of my compulsory classes is Dutch Linguistics, and a large part of this is the spelling. Even though I’m a native speaker of Dutch and I’ve always been fairly good at spelling, this thing is driving me crazy. I’m taking the exam in a couple of days (the first of many - wish me luck!), which also means I won’t be updating this blog quite as often. Oh well.

As an example of how crazy Dutch spelling is, I wanted to share one word with you, with all the rules and explanations of how to correctly spell it. That word is Spanjaard (in English Spaniard), and today, I’m going to correctly divide it into syllables for you, something that is paramount if you want to spell correctly. I won’t bore you to death with the intricate details, but I just wanna point out some weird things in the spelling.

First off, Spanjaard has, as in English, 2 sets of vowels, which are a and aa. So we have to divide somewhere in between. But where? The general rule says: if there are 2 consonants between vowels, divide between them. So we get Span-jaard, right? Wrong: there is an exception: you don’t have to divide between vowels but between sounds; and nj is pronounced as one sound (it sounds like the ñ in mañana). So it should be regarded as one consonant, and in that case, the rule is: divide in front of the consonant: Spa-njaard. Unfortunately, there’s another exception: a number of consonants require you to split in-between, like sc, nh and our beloved nj. So it’s Span-jaard. That’s it, then? Nope, not at all.

Spanjaard is, in fact, a derivation, which means we’ve done this thing all wrong so far! It’s derived from Spanje and -aard. The same is true in English: Spain and -iard. This has quite some consequences: the general rule for derivations is: divide between the source word and the pre/suffix; so we get Spanj-aard. How’s that for size? Unfortunately, there is again an exception: if the suffix starts with a vowel, you should follow the normal rules, which leads us to Span-jaard (see above). Right? Wrong. If the suffix is -aard, you should split between the source word and the suffix (again!). So do we end up with Spanj-aard? Nope! As you may guess, there’s yet another exception to the exception to the exception! Some words on -aard are split with the general rule, among which, you guessed it, is Spanjaard.

In the end, the right way to split Spanjaard is Span-jaard, and you have to know all the rules above to come to that conclusion. And if you think that this is a one-of-a-kind example, guess again: I could give you scores of other examples that are equally fucked up and which I have to learn to pass this exam. See why it’s driving me mad?