The Latin alphabet had been used from the beginning and it was not easy to make a distinction between long and short vowels (a / aa).
The word jaar (year) for instance, could be spelt jar, jaer, jair, or even yaer and iaer.
Still not entirely satisfactory, an ambitious project was proposed in 1851 to produce a large dictionary incorporating vocabulary of the past centuries.
This is no longer the case with modern Dutch, where land is still pronounced [lant] but spelled to conform with the plural landen, and hij vindt (he finds) (still [vint]) has both d of the infinitive (vinden) and the 3rd person singular ending t. From the very start of its written history, Dutch used the Latin alphabet.
Another feature of Middle Dutch is that articles or prepositions were often joined onto the word they belonged to: tjaer (the year) and dlant (the land), as in the accompanying fragment from Karel ende Elegast.
With the spirit of the French Revolution pervading all areas of thought, attempts were made to unify Dutch spelling and grammar.
Siegenbeek thought that the spelling should reflect refined Dutch pronunciation, taking into account the uniformity, etymology, and analogy.
Other spellings from Siegenbeek include: berigt (modern Dutch: bericht / report), blaauw (blauw / blue), Dingsdag (dinsdag / Tuesday), gooijen (gooien / to throw), magt (macht / power), kagchel (kachel / stove), koningrijk (koninkrijk /kingdom), muzijk (muziek / music) and zamen (samen / together).
He produced some of his own spellings which were popular in the 1830s and 1840s including the modern kachel (stove), plicht (instead of pligt /duty) and gooien (to throw).
However, other spellings of his did not last: andwoord (antwoord / answer), hair (haar /hair/her), ontfangen (ontvangen / to receive), thands (thans / at present) and wareld[specify] (wereld / world).
In the end, the jury, headed by Jan Frans Willems, produced their own suggestion in 1839 which remained quite close to the Siegenbeek spelling in use in the Netherlands.
The spelling used today both in the Netherlands and in Flanders (Dutch-speaking Belgium) is based on an orthography originally intended only for use in a dictionary.
An ambitious project was proposed in 1851 at the Taal- en Letterkundig Congres (Linguistic and Literary Congress) in Brussels at which both the Netherlands and Flanders were represented.
In addition, the Siegenbeek system did not address certain issues such as when compounds were to be written as one word or the interpolation of letters in between[vague].
The spelling of De Vries and Te Winkel combined elements of the three current systems, providing a much needed solution to the chaos.
The De Vries and Te Winkel spelling was introduced to the South African Republic (Transvaal) in 1888, after Dutch was declared to be the sole official language of the country by a constitutional amendment.
After the Second Boer War, the conference met again in Stellenbosch on 23 January 1903, and reaffirmed the simplification of Dutch orthography.
Viljoen consulted linguists and experts from the Netherlands and Flanders, and on 19 September 1903, the Commissie voor Taal en Letteren bij de Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde te Leiden (the Commission for Language and Literature in Leiden at the Society for Dutch Literature) held a meeting which twenty professors attended.
[4] In 1917, the Zuid-Afrikaanse Akademie voor Taal, Letteren en Kunst (the South African Academy for Language, Literature and Art) published the first edition of the Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls (the Afrikaans Wordlist and Spelling Rules), which set out the five principles which govern Afrikaans spelling as of 2019.
In 1916, a Dutch commission looked into the possibility of a compromise between De Vries and Te Winkel and the Kollewijn spelling.
This gradually led to adaptations: on 1 September 1934, the minister for Education, Marchant, accepted most of Kollewijn's proposals.
The Marchant spelling included: The endings '-isch' (as in logisch (logical)) and '-lijk' (mogelijk (possible)) remained unchanged.
During World War II the governments of the Netherlands and Flanders decided to look for a way to restore the unification of spelling based on De Vries and Te Winkel.
This led to the introduction of a simplification of the Marchant spelling being introduced in Flanders in 1946 and in the Netherlands the following year.
A "temporary" article of the binational agreement specified that place names would be left unchanged until appropriate legislation was passed by the competent national authorities.
In 1995, the new Groene Boekje was published; the alternative “progressive” spellings were abolished (it was now actie) and there were new rules about the n linking the compounds of words (pannekoek (pancake) became pannenkoek and bessesap (currant juice) became bessensap).
[13] In 1994 it was agreed that the vocabulary of het Groene Boekje should be revised every ten years without changing the actual rules of spelling[clarification needed].