Leiden University Student Repository

Kastelein, Emma 2014

I shall find you quite an Englishman? Hendrik Albert Schultens 1749–1793 and Learning English as a Second Language in the Eighteenth Century

Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)

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This thesis focuses on the proficiency in the English language of Hendrik Albert Schultens (1749–1793), a third-generation Dutch scholar in oriental languages of Leiden University who travelled to...Show moreThis thesis focuses on the proficiency in the English language of Hendrik Albert Schultens (1749–1793), a third-generation Dutch scholar in oriental languages of Leiden University who travelled to England in 1772 for scholarly purposes. I reconstructed Schultens's social network and investigated his proficiency in English on two points: his use and non-use of the auxiliary 'do' and his use of participial -ing clauses. The thesis contains an edition of thirty-eight eighteenth-century English letters, both received from Schultens's British acquaintances and sent by Schultens himself, the whole of which was transcribed to serve as the corpus of my thesis. I also reflected on the potential reason for Schultens to be interested in learning the English language when, in eighteenth-century Europe, French and Latin were still the two major languages in international contacts. I believe it to be due to the fact that there were so few scholars working in the field of oriental languages and that he wished to exchange information on an international level. In search of potential peers, he was not only prepared to look overseas, but also to immerse himself into the study of his peers’ language and culture for a better exchange of knowledge. When it comes to Schultens's English, he proved to have obtained the level of a near native when he left England. A remarkable achievement after only nine months. Of course he might have studied the English already in the Netherlands, potentially individually. From his first letter on he mastered the use op auxiliary 'do', despite the fact that a similar periphrastic construction does not exist in Dutch. On the other hand, his first two English letters contain errors in his use of participial -ing, or to be more exact: in his use of 'being'. In Dutch 'zijnde' (the Dutch equivalent of 'being') may be used in subordinate clauses to reduce relative clauses (i.e. to make sentences shorter). In English this type of usage of 'being' does not exist. In his first two letters, Schultens still had to figure this difference out. However, by staying long enough in the country of the goal language and leading an active social life among native speakers of English he evidently managed to get a grip on its right usage after all.Show less