Re: Official language question!

Rob Nierse wrote:

> Thomas wrote:
>
> I was in a second-hand book shop yesterday afternoon and came across a
copy
> of the old "Teach Yourself Dutch" for $2, so I bought it. Not a bad deal,
I
> thought! Anyway, the first chapter, which deals with pronunciation and
> spelling, makes reference to a spelling reform in 1947 which cleaned up
the
> "cumbersome and old-fashioned" spelling which had been used up until that
> time. That piqued my curiosity,
>
> Well, since no one has replied yet, I hope I can shine some light on this
> subject, eventhough I don't know much about it.
>
> To start with, words that ended in */sk/ (in Proto-Germanic) ended up
> in [sX] and eventually (nowadays) in [s]. Nevertheless, the [sX] was
> still written as 'sch', e.g. 'visch' "fish", which is now just 'vis'
[vIs].
>
> Also, there were many double vowels written in situations where one
> vowel could do: 'zoo' [zo] "so" has become 'zo'.
>
Wasn't there also an old practice-- if a 1-syl form had a long (double)
vowel, that was also written in derived forms.  e.g. laat - laater??? I
could be wrong, but I cut my Dutch teeth, so to speak, on an 1850s book,
using a 1930s dictionary, and it was quite confuzzing.

One bit of strangeness I still remember:  1853 ligchaam, modern lichaam
'body'