Impact of Circulation
1. Titel van het voorstel
The Birth of the Iamb in the Early Renaissance Low Countries
2. Aanvrager
Naam: Marc van Oostendorp
E-mail: marc.van.oostendorp@gmail.com
3. Beoogde uitvoerder
x aio, te werven
Naam:
Eventueel instelling:
Correspondentieadres:
Telefoon:
E-mail:
⃝ postdoc, te werven
4. Eventuele andere bij het onderzoek betrokkenen
Naam en titel
Specialisatie
Instelling
⃝ al bekend, namelijk:
Betrokkenheid/rol
5. Tijdsplanning van het project
Vermeld het moment van aanvang van het onderzoek, en de verwachte afronding van het
manuscript.
The project can start anytime, depending on requirements of the Meertens Instituut and/or the candidate
2016
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2017
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2018
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2019
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Preparation and orientation
Readings on synchrony of poetic metre and on synchronic phonology
Set up database of 16th Century Dutch poetry and initial analysis
Preparing experiments
Monthly meetings of project team
Designing and performing experiments
Preparation of article (chapter) on these experiments
Presenting results at international conference
Initial analyses on 16th Century corpus
Monthly meetings of project team
Doing extensive corpus study
Preparation of article (chapter) on this study
Presenting results at international conference
Collecting typological data
Monthly meetings of project team
Doing extensive study of metrical typology
Preparation of article (chapter) on this study
Presenting results at international conference
Impact of Circulation
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projectvoorstel (deadline 1 juni 2015)
Preparing dissertation
6. bijdrage aan inzicht in Impact of Circulation
(maximaal 500 woorden)
This project takes a case study of how languages change under language contact, how poetic
traditions change under cultural contact, and how change in language also influences the course
which a poetic tradition takes. It takes as point of departure a period in which the Low Countries
(Antwerp, Leiden, Amsterdam) were an important centre for international cultural and intellectual
life, and how influences coming from different sources (France, Italy) were integrated. The
programme clearly connects and complements the Circulation of Dutch Literature programme at
Huygens Institute, where the latter is more connected to the circulation of ideas in a literary
context and ours to that of linguistic and literary forms. In this way, the project aims to bridge the
divide somewhat between linguistics and the art studies which will be present within the future
KNAW Humanities Group.
7. Onderzoeksvoorstel
In the course of the early Renaissance period, something intriguing happened in the Netherlands:
within the course of a few decades, the structure of the verse line changed radically from a structure
that had been fairly stable for quite a number of centuries to something else which would remain
again fairly stable until (more or less) our times.
In medieval Dutch (and more generally, Germanic) poetic traditions, a line would have a fixed
number of stressed syllables (three in the following example; marked by underlining), with complete
freedom as to the number of intervening unstressed syllables:
Fraeye historie ende al waer
Mach ic u tellen, hoort naer.
Het was op enen avontstonde
Dat karel slapen begonde
(Karel ende Elegast, 13th Century)
Since the period just discussed, the standard line consists of iambs, i.e. fixed sequence of a stressed
syllable preceded by an unstressed syllable:
Je raakt de mensen en de dingen kwijt,
tot je het leven langzaam voelt verglijden
en deel wordt van het raadsel van de tijd.
(Jean-Pierre Rawie, ‘Raadsel’, 21st Century)
The change from the stress-based system to the foot-based system happened very rapidly and was
actually the product of many different sources. It clearly arose out of a Renaissance interest in forms
from antiquity as the English name iamb (from Greek iambos) suggests. However, ancient languages
(in particular Greek) had a rather different organization of their poetic line in which stress did not
seem relevant, but rather the length of syllables. A classical iamb was a short syllable followed by a
long one, not an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Such a system, which is somehow
difficult to ‘feel’ for a speaker of a modern Germanic language was apparently replaced by something
which was considered to be sufficiently similar.
But demonstrably other sources were at least as important. The actual models of Dutch 16th Century
poets such as Jan van der Noot (1539-1595) and Jan van Hout (1542-1609) were not the classics
directly, but Italian poets such as Petrarca (1303-1374), and even more clearly the French poets of the
Pléiade (whose works were translated by the Dutch poets).
The Pléiade poets, however, used a third type of metre, one which did not count the number of
stresses or the number of feet, but the number of syllables, without paying attention to stress at all.
For instance in the following poem by Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), every line has exactly 12
syllables (except that there might be one extra ‘silent’ syllable at the end). Furthermore, within every
line, there is a break after exactly 6 syllables:
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projectvoorstel (deadline 1 juni 2015)
Quand je serois un Turc, un Arabe, ou un Scythe,
Pauvre captif, malade, et d’honneur dévestu,
Laid, vieillard, impotent, encor’ ne devrois-tu
Estre, comme tu es, envers moy si dépite :
French poetry has continued to be written in this kind of metre until today. The fact that stress does
not play a role is sometimes explained by reference to the fact that stress does not play a role in
French phonology: there is some stress at the end of phrases, but French speakers are not aware of it,
they do not distinguish words by the location of stress and they are typically ‘stress-deaf’ when they
are acquiring other languages, meaning that they have a hard time hearing where the stress is
supposed to be in those languages.
This kind of metre was imitated by some Dutch poets as well, so that we find all three types of metre
(the ‘original’ Germanic one, the classical one and the fashionable French one) clashing in the corpus
of the late 16th Century, with eventually the foot-based one being completely dominant; in spite of
some experimentation with other metres in later times, poets seem to always have fallen back on the
iamb (and its inverse the trochee which has a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable).
Also most folk poetry is written in meters approximating this kind of foot-based regularity.
Our main hypothesis for this reason is that the eventual choice of foot-based metres reflected
something about the developing Dutch (standard) language at the time. Different from Romance
languages, and in particular French, Germanic languages are considered to be stress-based: whereas
in Romance languages all syllables have an approximately equal duration, in Germanic, it is the
distance between two stressed syllables which is more or less the same. This is the case not just in
poetry, but also in ordinary conversation. In the classical languages, on the other hand, it is the socalled mora that is the unit that counts, where a long syllable is supposed to have two mora’s and a
short syllable only one.
The first main hypothesis thus is:
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Foot-based metre is a way of implementing both classical metre and Romance stress-based
metre in a Germanic language.
Furthermore, the reason why foot-based metre did not arise earlier in Germanic may be due to the fact
that the phonological stress system of earlier Germanic was different, viz. one where stress was
uniformly on the first syllable of every word. This made just counting stresses (which basically
amounted to counting lexical words) a straightforward thing to do. By early Renaissance, so many
loanwords (from Latin and Romance) had come in that the original stress system had changed. The
second main hypothesis is thus:
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By the 16th Century, stress-based metres had become untenable because of the change in the
vocabulary.
Interestingly, something similar must have happened somewhat earlier in the English-speaking world,
since Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) already wrote iambs, and there is little reason to believe that he
influenced the Dutch poetic tradition at all. The German poetic tradition also ended up being tied to
iambic regularities, and this is usually ascribed to the fact that they picked it up in late 16th Century/
early 17th Century Leiden where poets like influential Martin Opitz (1597-1639) studied. A final
historical note we can make is that it is known that there are a few incidental cases of iambic verse
also in 14th Century Dutch poetry, in particular the Legend of St. Lutgart. There had been still-born
precursors to the development then (and it is probably no coincidence that Chaucer had studied
French and Italian poetry as had the probable author of Lutgart, Willem van Affligem).
We aim to study the question at hand using a variety of approaches. First, we will do a corpus study
on late 16th Century Dutch poetry, scanning a large number of poems (using tools already developed
such as the Meertens Scansion Machine) and trying in this way to outline how the metrical line
developed: how did syllable-count lines start showing alternating stress, how did stress-based lines do
the same thing, how many exceptions were allowed, and where were these exceptions located for
instance on loanwords, etc. Secondly, we will perform a typological study on metrical systems in the
worlds languages, trying to find out whether indeed the three kinds of poetic metre (stress, foot,
syllable) correspond to the three linguistic kinds (stress, mora, syllable). And finally, we foresee an
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experimental part in which we test how modern Dutch speakers reacted to especially created poetry
which fits the different kinds of metres (as well as intermediate forms).
Doing this, we hope to learn something eventually about phonological form, contributing to the
overall programme which was expressed by Nigel Fabb as ‘every poetic form reflects a non-poetic
linguistic form’: the kinds of intuitions which people use to create or read poetry are the same as their
ordinary linguistic intuitions. This project will therefore shed new light on the intuitions of 16th
Century Dutch speakers, as well as those of human beings more generally.
Although this project is primarily a linguistic one, we envisage fruitful contacts with the literary
scholars at Huygens, not just for their knowledge of relevant sources, but also for taking into account
complementary issues which were probably also important, such as the sociology of poetic life in the
16th Century Low Countries, the way in which literary influences worked more generally (we know
for instance that at some point stress-based systems became associated to traditional, so-called
‘rederijker’ poetry, and the fact that people lost there interest in that tradition will have played a role
as well).
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8. CV eventuele beoogde uitvoerder
geboortedatum:
vooropleiding
middelbare school:
universitaire opleiding:
gevolgde vakken/beoordeling:
onderwerp masterscriptie:
datum afronding:
cijfer/iudicium:
eventuele publicaties:
overige relevante activiteiten en ervaring:
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