As well known Dutch is an elusive language in which nouns not only frequently have double genders but also double, if not triple plurals. The plural form of the most nouns of Latin (forum, catalogus, collega, index, examen), Greek (basis, dogma) or Italian (concerto) origin can be, a) the plural form in the language from which the word is borrowed (fora, catalogi, collegae, indices, examina, bases, lemmata, tempi), b) the Dutch plural form in -s or -en, c) the two forms. We have used a servey carried out through Google 2011 (Nl. and Be) over four years (2007–2011) and two Dutch and two Flemish newspapers in order to assess to what extent the double plurals mentioned in WNT, ANS, and Grote van Dale (2005) are actually used by journalists. As Latin and Greek are less and less studied at school level while Italian never was, we could expect a shift from the imported plural forms to the Dutch forms.This indeed is the case for most Latin nouns ending with -a (collega’s), -ex (indexen) or -men (examens), Greek nouns ending with -ma (dogma’s), and Italian nouns ending with -o (tempo’s), yet not for other categories (fora, catalogi, bases), that in most cases retain their foreign plural. In both cases preference for one of the two plural forms is so obvious that dictionaries should only mention the plural form that is actually used.
Dutch is a most unstable language in which we find not only double plurals, double genders, and double suffixes, but also many cases of double or triple prepositions. As a rule, dictionaries mention them, but never define their relative frequency. In the present article I analyse the relative frequency of some fifty of those prepositions in two Dutch newspapers (NRC and De Telegraaf), two Flemish newspapers (De Standaard and De Morgen), and two weekly papers (Elsevier for the Netherlands and Knack for Flanders), i.e. in six papers that have been online for over ten years, aswell as in Google general corpora, namely the entire corpus and last year’s corpus. The selection of prepositions is based on two corpora by the association ‘Onze Taal’, which sometimes voices its preferences and on a number of prepositions I have come across on the Internet. I also refer to comments to be found in the ‘Grote van Dale’, the only Dutch dictionary that claims some linguistic authority. Our survey has shown that ‘Onze Taal’ and the ‘Grote van Dale’ are wrong in a number of cases as to preferences or inclusion of some prepositions in dictionaries. It also brings out significant differences between the Netherlands and Flanders.
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