Wiktionary talk:About Middle Dutch

Length marks on all long vowels?

@Mnemosientje, Lingo Bingo Dingo, Morgengave Right now, length marks are indicated on a, e and o, to indicate whether they are lengthened or originally long vowels. But the long i and u are always originally long, and the length can be inferred from the normalised spelling, so no length marks are included on those vowels. I've been wondering if it would be better to include the marks also on those vowels, to help those who are less familiar with Middle Dutch phonology and spelling, in particular those more familiar with Middle Low German. In that language, length is generally not indicated, so length marks are always needed. —Rua (mew) 19:55, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

@Rua I have no opinion on the matter, since I barely know any Middle Dutch. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 10:48, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

@Rua Like LBD, I don't have a whole lot of experience with Middle Dutch specifically, but here are my two cents..

• To answer your question, IMO if some vowels are marked as long with a macron/circumflex and others aren't, I think the average reader would assume that vowels that aren't specifically marked to be long are in fact short. So it may still be a good idea to include a length mark for the long i and u — not everyone, as you noted, will be familiar with the finer aspects of vowel length and spelling conventions for Middle Dutch.
• Regarding the circumflex/macron distinction in Middle Dutch entries -- wouldn't it be more intuitive to use just one symbol instead of two (preferably the macron)? The distinction between lengthened and inherited long vowels is an etymological one and as such belongs in the etymology section IMO, it just seems like overkill (and possibly rather confusing for casual readers) to use two different indicators for what boils down to the same sound, though their origins may differ. I don't think there are other languages on Wiktionary that similarly use different diacritics to indicate different etymological derivations for the same sounds. (Some Gothic dictionaries do something similar with acute accents on the diphthongs ai and au, but Wiktionary explicitly doesn't because it's an etymological distinction which needn't be incorporated into the spelling of the word.) — Mnemosientje (t · c) 14:06, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

The difference between originally long and lengthened vowels is a real phonological difference, that still exists in several dialects. They were absolutely not homophonous. The distinction is applied to Middle Low German as well, see WT:AGML. The difference with MLG is that normalised Middle Dutch uses double vowels to indicate length in closed syllables, so that length marks become mostly redundant. We add them anyway because of the aforementioned difference in types of long a, e and o, thus grôot, brêet etc. But for e.g. bruun or duve there's no distinction, so the type of vowel is obvious. I guess this question is twofold: whether we should write brûun and whether we should write dûve, to match with how other originally long vowels are marked. —Rua (mew) 14:15, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Ah, didn't know about the phonological distinction. So yeah, I'd say for the sake of consistency it'd be better to use the circumflex for long u and i as well. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 17:43, 7 February 2018 (UTC)