Grammatica - loco

8
Chapter 2
Spelling
Spelling
As with the pronunciation, it is assumed that the reader has grasped the
essentials of the highly regular spelling of Dutch (e.g. boom > bomen,
huis > huizen etc.) and that there is no need to repeat them here, but even
the more advanced student may need to be made aware of certain archaisms
that will be encountered in books printed prior to World War II, as well
as of certain recent changes to Dutch spelling. Some comments on the use
of accents, apostrophes, capital letters, hyphens and medial letters in
compound words are also made here.
2.1
Archaisms in printed matter from pre-1947
There are two main differences between modern spelling and that encountered
in works printed prior to the spelling reform of 1947:
(a) Many words that now end in -s previously ended in -sch although they
were not pronounced any differently from the way they are now:
mensch ‘person’, bosch ‘forest’, Duitsch ‘German’, Nederlandsch
‘Dutch’
Derivatives of such words were also written with sch:
menschen ‘people’, menschelijk ‘human’, boschen ‘forests’,
Duitschland ‘Germany’
This -sch ending, pronounced -s, has only been retained in the
adjectival ending -isch which occurs in loanwords of Greek and
Latin origin, e.g. cynisch, Belgisch, historisch, logisch etc.
(b) Ee and oo were not only doubled in closed syllables, as they are now
(e.g. been ‘leg’, boom ‘tree’), but also in open syllables in certain
words; it depended on the etymology of the word whether a double