Seventeenth-century grammarians and those that came after them attempted to keep the case system alive, and codified a written standard that included them.
It included not just the crumbling case system, but also a strict separation between masculine and feminine genders, falling out of use in some dialects as well.
By the 18th century, the everyday spoken language had lost its case system in most dialects, but it remained present in the written standard.
This is because in the older declension, the nominative was the same for the masculine and feminine gender, but the accusative forms differed: In the older standard, the nominative (nominatief or eerste naamval) was used for the following: The genitive (genitief or tweede naamval) was used in the following cases: Many of these uses are replaced by the preposition van in modern Dutch.
This form does not resemble the old genitive, which was a full case and had distinctive endings on each word in a phrase.
Gerunds can sometimes still be found in the genitive case in expressions involving tot ... toe: tot vervelens toe, (until boredom set in) tot bloedens toe (until bleeding occurred) The genitive of time and the old form of the possessive genitive are nowadays still used in quite a lot of more or less "frozen" forms: des daags (by day), des nachts or 's nachts (by night), 's ochtends (in the morning), 's avonds (in the evening), 's-Gravenhage, 's-Hertogenbosch, 's-Gravenbrakel, 's-Hertogenrade (place names), etc.
However, as distinctions between the grammatical cases were only weakly felt among speakers of Dutch, the feminine and neuter declensions were identical in the nominative and accusative, and the masculine declension was identical for the accusative and dative, endless confusion reigned.
The older standards of Dutch maintained a strict separation between the masculine, feminine and neuter gender.
While this is not significant in the modern language without cases, it was important in the older standard because the masculine and feminine nouns declined rather differently.
The masculine and feminine endings in -en and -e of the indefinite article were frequently dropped even in written language.
[8] However, the endings in -en and -e of een, geen, mijn, uw, zijn, hun, and haar were strictly maintained in government and administrative documents until 1946/7.
There also was a special vocative form for the neuter singular: Lieve kind (Sweet child).
Dutch, like many other Indo-European languages, has gradually moved its nominal morphology from synthetic to chiefly analytic.
It has retained some vestiges of the original case system, more so than English, but to a much lesser extent than German.
In addition, many surnames, toponyms and set expressions still exhibit fossilised inflected forms of the article and noun.
In Middle Dutch, a productive case system was still in existence, which was very similar to that of modern German.
[9] (adjective clein = small, noun worm = worm, daet = deed/action, broot = (loaf of) bread) It was already observed in the 15th century that there existed no distinction between the nominative and accusative forms of nouns and articles in the northern dialects.
[10] From the Renaissance onward, the view that the Dutch language should somehow be 'ennobled' with an extensive case system after the model of Latin was widespread.
Spieghel, an influential 16th-century grammarian, tried to reform and standardize the Dutch case system in his book on grammar, Twe-spraack van de Nederduitsche Letterkunst [Dialogue on the Low German art of letters] (1584).
)[12] Another artificial distinction, still in use today, between the plural personal pronouns hun (for the indirect object) and hen (for the direct object) was created by Christiaen van Heule, who wrote De Nederduytsche spraec-konst ofte tael-beschrijvinghe [The Low German speech-art or language-description] (printed in 1633).
Hooft often disagreed in assigning gender to nouns, which they arbitrarily based on equivalents in Latin, German, or other languages whenever they saw fit.
Their choices were adopted by the grammarian David van Hoogstraten in his Aenmerkingen over de Geslachten der Zelfstandige Naemwoorden [Comments on the genders of the independent nouns] (1700); where Vondel and Hooft disagreed, Van Hoogstraten would assign a gender to a noun by his own choice.
These "gender lists" were steadily extended, especially by professor Adriaan Kluit (1735–1807), who revised Van Hoogstraten's work.
[15] The practice of approaching Dutch as if it were a classical, inflecting language comparable to Latin and Greek (or German) was gradually abandoned in the 19th century, and it was recognized that word order played a far greater role in defining grammatical relationships.
Numerous remnants of the old system remain in the language, usually on the level of individual idioms, but there are larger issues.
In modern Dutch the two parts of a compound are typically linked by either -e-, -en- or -s- and historically these linkers descend from the genitive endings of the old case system.
Particularly the question when to use -e- or -en- became a source of a plethora of spelling errors, because the system that produced the forms was no longer understood.
In 1995 and 2006 spelling changes were adopted that introduced new rules that abandoned any relationship with the historical development of the word.