Prescriptivism on its own terms. Perceptions and realities of usage in Siegenbeek’sLijst(1847)

Abstract

In 1847, one of the first professors of Dutch, Matthijs Siegenbeek (1774-1854, published a purist word list entitled Lijst van woorden en uitdrukkingen met het Nederlandsch taaleigen strijdende, 'List of words and expressions at odds with the nature of Dutch'. In this pamphlet, he condemned a variety of loanwords and loan translations. Siegenbeek refers regularly to the usage of disapproved variants, employing a variety of quantifiers and sociolinguistic references. How well such statements reflect the linguistic reality, however, is a contentious issue in studies of prescriptivism. In this paper, we study Siegenbeek's pronouncements about usage against the backdrop of Curzan's concept of restorative prescriptivism. By studying the use of different types of quantifiers, and matching these to a text collection of historical fiction from the time, we show that Siegenbeek's statements about usage miss the mark for most specific variables. However, when we look at the average usage frequency, we see that as frequency terms increase in strength, so do the number of condemned variants, both for relative frequency and absolute frequency. Based on these results, we argue for a re-evaluation of the relationship between prescriptivism and usage, and a reappreciation of prescriptivists' frequency judgements.