Letters as Loot Volume 2 Letters as Loot. A sociolinguistic approach to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch by Gijsbert Rutten and Marijke J. van der Wal Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics (AHS) issn 2214-1057 Over the last three decades, historical sociolinguistics has developed into a mature and challenging field of study that focuses on language users and language use in the past. The social motivation of linguistic variation and change continues at the forefront of the historical sociolinguistic enquiry, but current research does not stop there. It extends from social and regional variation in language use to its various communicative contexts, registers and genres, and includes issues in language attitudes, policies and ideologies. One of the main stimuli for the field comes from new digitized resources and large text corpora, which enable the study of a much wider social coverage than before. Historical sociolinguists use variationist and dialectological research tools and techniques, perform pragmatic and social network analyses, and adopt innovative approaches from other disciplines. The series publishes monographs and thematic volumes, in English, on different languages and topics that contribute to our understanding of the relations between the individual, language and society in the past. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see www.benjamins.com/catalog/ahs Editors Marijke J. van der Wal Leiden University Terttu Nevalainen University of Helsinki Editorial Board Wendy Ayres-Bennett University of Cambridge Martin Durrell University of Manchester Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań William A. Kretzschmar Jr. University of Georgia, Athens GA Mieko Ogura Tsurumi University, Yokohama Suzanne Romaine University of Oxford Daniel Schreier University of Zurich Merja Stenroos University of Stavanger Sali A. Tagliamonte University of Toronto Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade Leiden University Donald N. Tuten Emory University, Atlanta GA Wim Vandenbussche Vrije Universiteit Brussel Anna Verschik Tallinn University Letters as Loot A sociolinguistic approach to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch Gijsbert Rutten Marijke J. van der Wal Leiden University John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia doi 10.1075/ahs.2 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2014023573 isbn 978 90 272 0081 5 (hb) isbn 978 90 272 6957 7 (e-book) © 2014 – John Benjamins B.V. The e-book edition of this book is made available under a CC BY-NC-Nd 3.0 license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa 8 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Table of contents Preface and acknowledgements xi chapter 1 Letters as Loot : A historical-sociolinguistic challenge 1 1. The Letters as Loot source 1 2. Letters as Loot and language history ‘from below’ 2 3. Selection of periods and phenomena 5 4. Speech and writing 7 5. The variables 9 6. The autograph status of letters, corpora and presentation of results 13 7. Outlook 17 chapter 2 Sounds and signs: From local to supralocal usage 19 1. Introduction 19 2. Standard languages, language standards and the degree of orality 19 3. The degree of orality in the history of Dutch 21 4. Case studies Zeeland 23 4.1 The subcorpora used 23 4.2 H -dropping in the seventeenth century: First case study 24 4.3 H -dropping in the seventeenth century: Second case study 26 4.3.1 Deletion of h 26 4.3.2 Prothesis of h 30 4.3.3 Substitution of 〈 h 〉 for 〈 a 〉 31 4.4 H -dropping in the eighteenth century, and diachronically 32 4.5 Long e ’s in the seventeenth century 34 4.6 Long e ’s in the eighteenth century, and diachronically 41 4.7 Conclusions 44 5. Case studies North Holland and Amsterdam 46 5.1 The subcorpora used 47 5.2 Germanic sk 49 5.2.1 Seventeenth-century North Holland 50 5.2.2 Seventeenth-century Amsterdam 51 5.2.3 Eighteenth-century North Holland 52 5.2.4 Eighteenth-century Amsterdam 53 Letters as Loot 5.3 Germanic ft 54 5.3.1 Seventeenth-century North Holland 55 5.3.2 Seventeenth-century Amsterdam 56 5.3.3 Eighteenth-century North Holland 57 5.3.4 Eighteenth-century Amsterdam 58 5.4 A -like vowels in the seventeenth century 58 5.4.1 The representation of a -like vowels 58 5.4.2 The writing systems used 61 5.5 Prefix ge - in the seventeenth century 65 5.6 Long e ’s in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 67 5.7 Conclusions 72 6. Conclusions 73 chapter 3 Epistolary formulae: Functions and text composition 75 1. Introduction 75 2. A sample letter 77 3. The subcorpora 81 4. Functions of epistolary formulae 81 Text-constitutive formulae 82 Intersubjective formulae 83 Christian-ritual formulae 83 5. Text composition 85 6. Text-constitutive formulae 86 6.1 Text-type formulae 86 6.1.1 Address 87 Prepositional phrases having the meaning “to” 87 The addressee’s name and social role 88 The addressee’s location 90 The means by which the letter is sent 92 Additional information 93 6.1.2 Date 93 Praise to God 94 The writer’s location 94 The date 95 Additional information 97 6.1.3 Opening 97 Addressing the recipient 98 Greeting the recipient 100 Referring to (earlier) communication 101 6.1.4 Closing 105 6.2 Text-structural formulae 108 6.2.1 Initiating discourse 108 Table of contents 6.2.2 Continuing discourse 109 6.2.3 Ending discourse 111 7. Intersubjective formulae 114 7.1 Health formulae 114 7.1.1 Health statements 114 7.1.2 Health wishes 117 7.1.3 Subordinate health formulae 118 7.1.4 Health formulae in the eighteenth century 121 7.2 Greeting formulae 121 7.3 Contact formulae 123 8. Christian-ritual formulae 125 9. Conclusions 127 chapter 4 Variation and change in formulaic language 129 1. Introduction 129 2. Formulaic language and writing experience 130 2.1 Previous research 130 2.2 Processing effort and writing experience 131 2.3 Writing experience and social variables 133 2.4 Summing up – hypotheses 134 3. Case studies 135 3.1 The subcorpora 136 3.2 Greeting 137 3.3 Communicating health 141 3.4 Communicating sorrow 146 3.5 Communicating God’s omniscience 150 3.6 Initiating discourse 153 3.7 Continuing discourse 158 3.8 Conclusions 163 4. Variation and change as functions of writing experience 164 4.1 The social literacy boundary 164 4.2 Gender differences 167 4.3 Incremental and levelling writing experience 169 4.4 Writing experience vs. social identity and style 170 5. Conclusions and further discussion 171 chapter 5 Detailing the writing process: Formulaic language, social and professional writers, and the influence of letter-writing manuals 173 1. Introduction 173 2. The non-autograph subcorpus 174 Letters as Loot 3. Comparing autographs and non-autographs 174 3.1 Greeting 174 3.2 Communicating health 175 3.3 Communicating sorrow 176 3.4 Communicating God’s omniscience 177 3.5 Initiating discourse 177 3.6 Continuing discourse 178 3.7 Conclusion 179 4. Writing in the name of: Social or professional writers 180 5. Formulaic language, group practices and social routine 185 6. Formulae in letter-writing manuals 187 6.1 Elite manuals 188 6.2 School books 190 6.3 Jacobi and his successors 195 7. Conclusions 202 chapter 6 Forms of address 203 1. Introduction 203 2. Forms of address in the history of Dutch 204 3. Politeness as a variable 207 3.1 Private vs business 208 3.2 Within the core family 209 3.3 The j -forms 213 3.3.1 The seventeenth century 213 3.3.2 The eighteenth century 218 3.4 An increase in negative politeness? 222 3.5 Politic behaviour and social stratification 223 4. Sociolinguistic variation and change 225 4.1 The overall diachronic picture 226 4.2 Epistolary forms of address 227 4.2.1 The seventeenth century 227 4.2.2 The eighteenth century 231 4.2.3 Social effects on the change from ul to ue 235 4.2.4 The contexts in which epistolary forms appear 236 4.3 The pronominal forms of address 239 5. Politeness – again 243 6. Conclusions 245 chapter 7 Clause chaining between spoken and written language 247 1. Introduction 247 2. The subcorpora 250 Table of contents 3. Clause linking in the letter corpus 251 3.1 No bleached connectives and no punctuation 252 3.2 Bleached connectives, but no punctuation 254 3.3 Bleached connectives as well as punctuation 255 3.4 Punctuation, but no bleached connectives 256 4. Grammaticalisation of clause linkages and discourse markers 257 5. The rise of punctuation 266 6. Variation and change in clause chaining 269 6.1 Discourse units 271 6.2 Sociolinguistic patterns 280 7. The interplay of punctuation and clause chaining 284 8. Conclusions 286 chapter 8 Variation and change in the relative clause 289 1. Introduction 289 2. Relativisation in the history of Dutch 289 3. Syntacticisation of the relative clause – hypotheses 293 4. Variation and change in the relative clause – case studies 296 4.1 Extracting d ’s and w ’s – diachronic results 296 4.2 Social and gender variation 297 4.3 A change from above 302 5. Relativisation and incremental writing experience 302 6. Relativisation and formulaic language 304 6.1 Epistolary formulae 305 6.2 Constructional diffusion 313 7. Relativisation and clause integration 313 7.1 Integration of relative clauses 314 7.2 Integration and syntacticisation 318 8. Conclusions 320 chapter 9 Apocope of final schwa 323 1. Introduction 323 2. The subcorpora 325 3. A regionally diffused phonological change 326 3.1 The broad picture by time and region 326 3.2 Right context 331 3.3 Left context 335 4. North Holland, including Amsterdam 338 5. South Holland 341 6. Zeeland 344 Letters as Loot 7. Interpreting social and regional variation 347 8. Epistolary conventions 350 8.1 Formulaic language 350 8.2 Zero subjects 355 9. Conclusions 360 chapter 10 Clausal and local negation 363 1. Introduction 363 2. The subcorpora and the overall results 364 3. Regional patterns 365 4. Constructional patterns 368 5. Lexical-semantic patterns 373 5.1 The negators niet and geen 373 5.2 Type of verb 374 6. Phonological patterns 378 7. Complexity effects 380 7.1 Proximity 381 7.2 Verbal cluster complexity 383 8. Social patterns 385 9. Social patterns in Amsterdam and Zeeland 388 10. Conclusions 391 chapter 11 Harvesting: Reflection and evaluation 393 1. Harvesting: Introduction 393 2. Mapping variation and change 393 3. Explanations: Community practices and politeness theory 396 4. The writing process and different degrees of writing experience: Connecting all the data 398 4.1 Acquiring writing skills 398 4.2 Phenomena and the explanation of writing experience 401 5. The complex nature of change 404 6. The fruits of confiscated letters 405 7. Conclusions 408 References 409 Index 425 Preface and acknowledgements The present volume is the fruit of the Letters as Loot. Towards a non-standard view on the history of Dutch research programme (2008–2013), funded by the Netherlands Or- ganisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and conducted at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. In this programme, initiated and directed by Marijke van der Wal, Gijsbert Rutten participated as a postdoctoral researcher. We both would like to acknowledge our gratitude to a number of persons and institutions which were most helpful and supportive in various stages of our research project. Our research would not have been possible without the facilities provided by the National Archives (Kew, UK) where the impressive source of confiscated Dutch docu- ments is currently kept. It was always a great pleasure for our research team to work in the Map and Large Document Reading Room, discovering new and surprising finds in the High Court of Admiralty’s (HCA) archive. Thanks are also due for giving us the opportunity to make digital photos during our frequent visits. With a few exceptions, all photos of the original documents represented in the present volume were taken – courtesy of the National Archives – by members of our Letters as Loot research team. Three photos (Figures 2, 3 and 4 in Chapter 5) were provided by the Metamorfoze project, a national enterprise aimed at preserving Dutch paper heritage. The way for our archival research was paved by historians Els van Eyck van Heslinga and Perry Moree, both at the time affiliated to the National Library of the Netherlands (The Hague), who over the years continued to stress the importance of the ‘sailing letters’, and by Roelof van Gelder (Amsterdam) who made the indis- pensable inventory of more than one thousand HCA boxes. Erik van der Doe (National Archive, The Hague) and Dirk Tang (National Library of the Netherlands) were helpful in various respects related to the Metamorfoze project. The Leids Universiteitsfonds (LUF) supported a pilot project carried out by Marijke van der Wal in order to establish whether the private letters among the HCA documents were indeed such a treasure for historical linguists as she suspected them to be. Once it became clear that this was indeed the case, the contributions by partici- pants of the Wikiscripta Neerlandica project, which ran successfully from 2007 till the end of 2011, were invaluable for our research. The volunteers of this Leiden-based project, initiated by Marijke van der Wal, carried out most of the time-consuming transcription process and at many occasions showed their enthusiasm for the extra- ordinary letters. We are greatly indebted to them all. Thanks are also due to Coen Zimmerman (Leiden) who constructed a tailor-made database to store and retrieve all the information on the letters in our corpus. Letters as Loot Special and heartfelt thanks go to the members of our Letters as Loot team who shared our fascination for the rediscovered letters: the PhD-researchers Judith Nobels and Tanja Simons, who both successfully defended their theses (Extra)Ordinary letters and Ongekend 18e-eeuws Nederlands in 2013, and the research assistants Reinald Molenaar and Juliette Sandberg, who were such a great help in administrative, practi- cal and transcription matters. Students, both at BA and MA level, were involved in our project, of whom we would like to mention Chrisje Meima in particular. From the very start Elisabeth Koning (Oegstgeest) has been a most inspiring companion who took thousands of photos during our visits to the National Archives and who also gave her invaluable advice on many issues over the years. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of various colleagues of the Institute for Dutch Lexicology (INL, Leiden): Marijke Mooijaart and her lexicological assistants who carefully tagged and lemmatised our corpus, and Katrien Depuydt and Jesse de Does who took care of the advanced technology needed for a user-friendly applica- tion. This excellent collaboration resulted in making availabe our whole corpus, in- cluding photos, transcriptions and metadata, through an attractive website provided with elaborate search tools (http://brievenalsbuit.inl.nl). During our long-term project many colleagues and others took a great interest in our letter treasure: colleagues in the Department of Dutch Language and Culture, in the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, in other parts of the Leiden Faculty of Humanities and also linguists abroad. We cannot list them all individually, but we would like to mention Wim van den Doel, the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Ton van Haaften, the director of LUCL, and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, who has a chair in English Socio-historical Linguistics: they all showed their continued interest in our research, stressing the impact of this important project. And last but not least we would like to mention with the utmost gratitude the continuous support and en- couragement that we received from the Merweborgh foundation, in particular from the members of its board of curators Menno Witteveen (The Hague), Judith Pollmann (Leiden) and Jos Schaeken (Leiden/The Hague). Over the years we were both heavily involved in the Letters as Loot research, which led to a range of publications and to draft chapters for the present volume. During the last stage of the project Marijke van der Wal transformed the draft texts, mainly based on research by Gijsbert Rutten, into the present book, which was subsequently ac- cepted for the AHS series. We thank Marilyn Hedges (Leiden/The Hague) for her in- valuable linguistic advice and for carefully correcting our final English texts. During the peer review process that followed we benefited greatly from the constructive com- ments made by the anonymous referees for John Benjamins Publishing Company. We also highly appreciate the editorial advice given by Terttu Nevalainen, one of the edi- tors of the AHS series, and Anke de Looper (John Benjamins Publishing Company) during the various stages of the publishing process. Preface and acknowledgements Finally, for us both Letters as Loot marks the end of a period of inspiring collabora- tion concentrated on a unique source of letters from the past. We hope that the readers of our book will discover the immense value of this intriguing source which we expect will continue to inspire historical linguists and scholars from various other disciplines. Gijsbert Rutten and Marijke van der Wal Leiden, April 2014 chapter 1 Letters as Loot A historical-sociolinguistic challenge 1. The Letters as Loot source It is something of a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a historical linguist to immedi- ately understand the far-reaching perspectives opened up by a newly rediscovered text source. This is what the second author of the present book experienced when she was presented with the still rough inventory made of the so-called ‘sailing letters’, an im- pressive source of documents, currently kept in the British National Archives (Kew, UK; van Gelder 2006). These documents are remnants of times of warfare and priva- teering, the longstanding legitimate activity of conquering enemy ships, which in the past was performed by all seafaring European countries and regulated by strict rules. The ‘sailing letters’ comprise approximately 40,000 Dutch letters that, with all other papers, both commercial and private, were confiscated aboard ships taken by the Eng- lish fleet and by private ships ( privateers ) during the frequent warfare between England and the Netherlands, from the second half of the seventeenth century to the early nine- teenth century (van Gelder 2006: 31). Among these are some 15,000 private letters. To fully appreciate the huge number of letters it is important to note that in very many cases the ships’ cargo contained far more mail than the crew’s own correspondence and the letters that the crew had in their possession to deliver for relatives, friends and ac- quaintances. 1 Ships often took mailbags on board, thus functioning as mail carriers between the Netherlands and regions such as the Caribbean, western Africa and Asia. In the legal procedure that followed the taking of ships in England, the confiscated papers were considered evidence in cases where the High Court of Admiralty (HCA) had to decide whether the conquered ships were taken lawfully. If the rules had been followed scrupulously, the ship and all its cargo were considered as loot for the priva- teer (van Gelder 2006: 10–15; van Vliet 2007: 53–55). Once the final decision had been reached, the papers, which, apart from the letters, comprise a wide range of other ma- terial including treatises on seamanship, plantation accounts, textile samples, ships’ journals, poems and lists of slaves, remained in the HCA’s Archives. Miraculously, they have survived to the present day, and are currently stored in over a thousand boxes in the British National Archives. 1. Many letters were obviously sent through friends according to the phrase met vryent dye god gheleyde “with a friend whom God may lead” and its variants on the outside of the letters. This method of delivering mail was common practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Letters as Loot Figure 1. Address of a letter sent met vrind die god geleyd over zee “with a friend whom God leads/may lead over sea”, 30 January 1781. A brief pilot study by Marijke van der Wal showed the uniqueness of the source mate- rial by confirming the assumption that the private letters stem from a rich variety of senders, both men and women (and even children) of all social ranks. The material proved to include letters from the lower classes which have otherwise left very few written traces (van der Wal 2006: 9–11; 2008: 95–99). This text source, therefore, called for a historical-sociolinguistic approach, more in particular what has become known as a ‘language history from below’ approach (Elspaß e.a. 2007; Elspaß 2012a: 160–162). This conclusion led to the start of the Letters as Loot research programme, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and conducted at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). 2 The present monograph is the fruit of joint research within this Letters as Loot programme. 2. Letters as Loot and language history ‘from below’ The history of Dutch is very similar to that of other western European languages in that it has been dominated by the standardisation perspective for a considerable time. 2. The Letters as Loot. Towards a non-standard view on the history of Dutch research pro- gramme (2008–2013) was initiated and directed by Marijke van der Wal. Gijsbert Rutten par- ticipated in the programme as a postdoctoral researcher (cf. van der Wal, Rutten & Simons 2012: 139–143 and www.brievenalsbuit.nl). Chapter 1. Letters as Loot Figure 2. One of the HCA boxes in the National Archives (Kew, UK). The Dutch standardisation process included the familiar development from mainly dialect diversity in the Middle Ages towards a supraregional standard language in sub- sequent centuries. Codification started in the second half of the sixteenth century and has continued with the publication of grammars, dictionaries and other normative texts ever since. In the standardisation process, the region of Holland took the lead as the political, economic and cultural superpower. The traditional view of the stand- ardisation of Dutch is largely based on the language of printed texts that were mainly written by well-educated upper-class men. Over the centuries, the written language of this small upper layer of society became increasingly uniform, which has given the impression of a standard language gaining more and more ground. Whereas the sev- enteenth-century printed language still allowed a fair degree of variation, the eight- eenth-century printed language shows considerable uniformity. Linguistic uniformity was therefore assumed to have been consolidated in the eighteenth century. This type of traditional language history, which has been characterised as a form of tunnel vision (Watts & Trudgill 2002), relied on the language use of the highest ranks in society, which, according to Elspaß (2007: 4–5), consisted of no more than five per cent of the contemporary population. An approach such as that from the perspective of ‘below’ has a much broader scope, and explicitly focuses on the language of the middle and lower classes and their hand- written texts (Elspaß 2012a: 160–162). However, despite the increasing awareness that Letters as Loot the standardisation process and the ‘remaining’ linguistic diversity are two sides of the same coin that should be addressed equally and should complement each other, practi- cal problems such as finding appropriate data may hinder such a broader approach. Until recently, apart from studying printed texts, linguists had to rely mainly on private documents written by men from the higher ranks of society for the history of the Dutch language. Private documents from women in general and from both men and women of the lower and middle classes were available only in very small numbers, scattered over various archives in the Netherlands. 3 Against the background of these scarce data, the importance of the ‘sailing letters’ source stands out. Since the confiscated private letters were shown to compensate for this lack of linguistic data, we were able to explore, in the Letters as Loot research programme, what is largely a terra incognita of Dutch language history from below. In other words, the letters offered an excellent opportunity for map- ping linguistic diversity and filling in the gaps left by traditional historical linguistics that in many cases had a teleological perspective on language history, as they focused mainly on literary texts and formal texts from higher registers (van der Wal 2006). Our large-scale exploration of private letters took place within a historical socio- linguistic framework that has broadened its scope over the past three decades. Multi- faceted historical-sociolinguistic research in different language areas and for different time periods (cf. Hernández-Campoy & Conde-Silvestre 2012) comprises different trends of research. The research ranges from studies of genre variation by multi-genre corpora such as the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, regional variation, for instance in Elspaß’s corpus of nineteenth-century German emigrant letters (Elspaß 2005, 2012b: 47–48), and social, gender and age variation in corpora provided with metadata on the writers of the corpus texts, such as the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (cf. Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 1996, 2003) to social network studies at the core of which are individuals and their relationships (e.g. Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2005). It is no coincidence that many of the corpora explored for this research consist of private letters (cf. Elspaß 2012a: 162–163 for an overview of such corpora). 4 Of all written text types, private letters are considered to be as close to speech as non-fictional historical texts can possibly be, which means that such letters allow us to trace the informal language and linguistic variation of the past (van der Wal 2006; Elspaß 2012a: 156). More in particular, our research tied in with an approach from the perspective of language history from below, which focuses on non-literary everyday language, presumably found in ego-documents such as letters and diaries from lower- and 3. For the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Boyce Hendriks (1998) compiled a collection of approximately 400 letters; for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gaspar (2003) transcribed approximately 500 letters; for the Napoleonic period, approximately 300 sol- diers’ letters are available at www.janvanbakel.nl (cf. Rutten, Vosters & van der Wal, to appear). 4. For Dutch, Vandenbussche and Willemyns and their research group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) have concentrated on historical-sociolinguistic research of mainly administra- tive text types of the nineteenth-century Southern Netherlands (cf. Willemyns & Vandenbussche 2000; Vandenbussche 2002; Vosters & Vandenbussche 2012). Chapter 1. Letters as Loot middle-class writers (Elspaß 2012a: 160–162; van der Wal & Rutten 2013c). To avoid any misunderstanding, we stress that the term ‘from below’ primarily refers to the social ranks below the highest social class and to texts representing everyday lan- guage that could thus be considered as below formal registers such as the language of literature (Elspaß 2007: 5). The ambiguous and sometimes confusing term ‘from be- low’ will not be used to indicate only linguistic phenomena from below the level of awareness (Labov 1994: 78) or linguistic changes that start in the lower social classes. In the present book, we take into account various kinds of linguistic phenomena, some below and others above the level of awareness, and various kinds of changes that appear to have spread either from below or from above socially. Generally speak- ing, we consider making available insights into the as yet mainly unknown written (and spoken) language of major parts of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch population, men and women alike, to be one of the challenges of our research. To further detail our goals, we aim to map variation and change (1), present explana- tions for the variation and change found (2), fill gaps in the history of Dutch (3) and contribute to the international historical-sociolinguistic debate (4). In the final chap- ter of this volume, evaluating both the epistolary material and the historical-sociolin- guistic approach applied, we will assess to what extent we succeeded in achieving these goals. In the present chapter, we discuss the main issues of our research and the choices that had to be made prior to conducting the research. 3. Selection of periods and phenomena Before starting to analyse the letters from a historical-sociolinguistic perspective, a selection had to be made from the various periods when England and the Netherlands were at war with one another: the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), Second Anglo- Dutch War (1665–1667), Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and the American War of Independence (1776–1784), and the Napoleonic period (1793–1813). 5 Two periods of about ten years each were chosen for making cross-sections in the approximately 15,000 private letters: the seventeenth-century period of 1664–1674, from the prelude to the Second to the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and the eighteenth-century period of 1776–1784, from the start of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War to the end of the American War of Independence. 6 Letters from these different 5. Apart from these periods, documents survived from ships taken during the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), periods of partial neu- trality and changing alliances (van Gelder 2006: 15, 30). 6. The cross-sections correspond with two PhD sub-projects of the Letters as Loot programme: Everyday Dutch of the lower and middle classes. Private letters in times of war (1665 – 1674) , car- ried out by Judith Nobels, and A perspective from below. Private letters versus printed uniformity (1776 – 1784) , by Tanja Simons. Cf. Nobels (2013) and Simons (2013). Letters as Loot Figure 3. Raid on the Medway (or Battle of Chatham), Second Anglo-Dutch War. Painting by Pieter Cornelisz. Van Soest, National Maritime Museum Greenwich. periods, with an intended interval of approximately one hundred years, were selected and digitally photographed during a number of visits to the National Archives. From the digital photographs taken, transcriptions of the letters were made following a dip- lomatic transcription method without any normalisation of word boundaries or of i/j and u/v variation. 7 Thus we transcribed ghe coft, iaer and bouen which we did not change into ghecoft “bought”, jaer “year” and boven “above” as will become apparent in the examples and quotations in the following chapters. We opted for this transcription method in order to enable various kinds of linguistic analyses, including phonological and graphematic analyses. 8 The letter corpora we compiled, the detailed structure of which we will discuss below, allow for studies at all linguistic levels, from phonology and orthography to morphosyntax and text composition. For the present monograph, we concentrated on 7. The time-consuming transcription process was carried out mainly by volunteers of the Wikiscripta Neerlandica project, which was initiated by Marijke van der Wal and ran success- fully from 2007 until the end of 2011. The participants provided transcriptions that were carefully checked by different members of the Letters as Loot research team before they were accepted as final transcriptions for the electronic corpus. 8. Both the transcriptions and the corresponding digital photographs were included in a dig- ital archive. As a working tool, a database, specifically developed for the Letters as Loot research programme, was constructed to store and retrieve all the information on the letters. The tran- scriptions, digital photographs and metadata of our final research corpus (cf. Table 2) are avail- able at http://brievenalsbuit.inl.nl.