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History of Dutch orthography
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The History of Dutch Orthography covers the changes in spelling both in the Netherlands itself and in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in Belgium.
The Middle Dutch language had no fixed grammar. Texts were written according to the dialect of the author, producing various inconsistencies and a recognisable indication of the origin of the text in question. Spelling was likewise subject to variations, with words being written as they sounded, rather than by reference to any standardised works.
The Dutch language is written using the Latin alphabet, which creates the problem that there are fewer letters than there are sounds, particularly in relation to vowel sounds, where distinctions needed to be made between short and long vowels. A word such as jaar, for example, was differentiated from the word jar originally by spelling it jair and jaer (as well as yaer and iaer) before eventually being standardised as the modern spelling
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