Empty words, full goblets, contented interlocutors – some notes on conversational routines in a colloquy from the 16^th century

     The article analyzes the three conversations in the 1527 version of Noel van Barlainmont’s Dutch–French Vocabulare with regard to aspects of Dutch (or Flemish) historical pragmatics. The analysis shows: (1) some parallel language structures in both languages that can be seen as likely authentic: (a) a single address pronoun; (b) address terms (kinship terms, especially the today semantically more restrictive “nephew/niece”, and “friend” for a customer), (b) (full and elliptical) greetings with the pattern “God give you [+ tomorrow/day/evening]”, (c) the high frequency of imperatives for directive speech-acts (and the infrequent use of positive, negative, and indirect politeness), (d) the high frequency of imperative for commissive (and commissive-directive) language acts, (e) farewell phrases with the element “God”; (2) noteworthy content structures: (a) “adequate rudeness” in bargaining, (b) lying by a debtor in front of a creditor and a potential bail, (c) the small-talk topic “war and peace” and (d) prolonged leave-taking scenes; (3) Flemish peculiarities (in contrast to French): (a) the more frequent use of “my” before address terms, (b) the pattern “Hoe vaar jij?” after the greeting formula, (c) the connection of “Yes” and “No” with pronouns, (d) Ic danck v, ic bedanck v, grooten danck and, possibly, God segen u as variants of thanking, (e) in addition to te gode, there is also the French borrowing adieu.

This contribution discusses three forms of conscious word formation in Dutch that show characteristics of word play: (pseudo) embellished clipping, blending and libfixing. Traditionally, these word formation processes are considered unpredictable and not systematic. Analysis of these processes shows that they are by no means chaotic, but that they follow fixed rules and systematics. According to this research, language play is not unfocused, but follows rules of which the language user is not aware. The forms of language play analyzed here can lead to language changes, which should consequently not be regarded as accidental.

This article describes and analyses communication as a complex action embedded in a social and cultural context. The communicative action consists of explicit language utter­ance and of implicit presuppositions of the speaker who is entering the commu­ni­cative act with a specific communicative goal. This goal can be reached only if the implicit pre­suppositions of the speaker are mutually shared among the participants of the discussion. The social and cultural context can be seen as implicit presuppositions of the speaker and these contextual presuppositions are playing an important role in the communicative situations. Habermas divides the communicative acts according to the level of rationality and according to the communicative goal of the speaker into different types. The rational discourses can be analyzed by mean of argumentative analysis which can be also used for a reconstruction of communicative acts which happened in the past.

Some principles of intercultural personal development for future translators (not only Dutch translators).

     This paper points out the necessary hard and soft skills of future translators and interpreters with regard to their intercultural competences. The issue has been widely discussed around the world, but the wide range of problems needs to be updated in each country, for each language pair. For students of Dutch Studies, the fact that Dutch as a pluricentric language often has terminological variants and pseudo-synonyms adds to this. In any case, this should also be conveyed didactically and thus sensitize the students in this respect as well.

Martinus Nijhoff (The Hague 1894–1953), the Dutch poet, playwright, literary translator and essayist is today considered the greatest modern Dutch poet and is probably the best known. Apart from his original work, he is the best-known literary translator of his time, and his approach to language is most vividly expressed in his translations. Translation is not just a sideline activity: he sees it as a rebirth of the poem. In this paper, I will attempt to outline his approach to translation, based on both his translation critiques and his own translations.

This article deals with the variation of diminutive forms in contemporary Standard Dutch. Despite the well-described rules of diminutive formation, there are a number of words that have more than one well-formed diminutive forms in Dutch. The article provides a brief overview of diminutive formation in Dutch, as well as a description of the cases where a word can have more than one grammatical diminutive form. The second part of the article is an account of a corpus-based study examining the words that contain a high vowel in their final (or only) syllables and end in m, n or l. The goal of the study is to examine the behaviour of the diminutive forms of these stems.

Our research explores the effects of digital supplementary course materials used among Hungarian students in secondary education learning Dutch. Our aim was to investigate how supplementary electronic, online and digital course material impacts students aged 15-20 learning Dutch at school as well as their motivation, their experience of flow/anti-flow and their level of Dutch. During the intervention we applied HANNA, a course material developed for tablets, and Mondly, a phone application. Our research focused on 2 main research questions and 5 hypotheses, regarding motivation, motivational pattern and the expected changes, while the hypotheses centred on the flow/antiflow experience, the level of language and its changes. Both the research questions and the hypotheses were established in an abductive framework. We employed qualitative research methods due to the number of our samples. Our research incorporated focusgroup and individual interviews as well. The study was supported by the Foreign Research Group On Language Teaching, a joint project between the Hungarian Academy and the University of Debrecen.

This study examines two stories from the Middle Ages: The Dutch knight novel, Karel ende Elegast and the Hungarian folk tale, Mátyás király lopni megy [King Matthias goes stealing]. In both stories, the king in disguise goes to steal with an accomplice (an expe­ri­enced thief). As a result, an attack on the king on the next day is prevented. The motif of the king in disguise having to go stealing to uncover a conspiracy against him is a universal fairy tale motif. In different countries and cultures, one can find this wandering motif from Norway to Mongolia. In this study, we want to make a Hungarian contribution to this research.

Imre Forró, a theology student from Debrecen, studied at Utrecht University in the 1930s with a scholarship from the Stipendium Bernardinum. Several sources about his studies abroad have survived. Some of them are kept in the archives of the Reformed Church District of Tiszántúl, others are in the family archives. The sources allow us to reconstruct the life of the former student abroad. We know with which professor he studied and took his exams, where he lived, with whom he made friends, which associations (International Students’ Club, Voetius Reformed Theologians’ Association) he was a member of. Forró was the first to start a systematic, source-level investigation of the Franeker peregrination, but (due to illness and unfounded accusations of plagiarism) he was only able to continue this after his retirement.