8.8 /10 1 Votes
4.5/5 Bol | 4.3/5 Goodreads Originally published 1981 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Opperlandse taal- & letterkunde (written in 1981) is a book dedicated to peculiarities of the Dutch language. It was written by 'Battus', one of many pseudonyms of Hugo Brandt Corstius. The title means "Upperlandic Language and Linguistics", where "Upperlandic" is word play on "Netherlandic". The book has ten chapters, numbered 0 through 9, that humoristically use the Dutch language. Chapters are interleaved, with all odd pages belonging to different chapters than the adjacent even pages. This confusion is, of course, intentional. Different fonts are used for both sets of pages.
Chapter 0, titled "Programme and Constitution of Upperlandic" explains what is Upperlandic.
Upperlandic is Dutch on vacation. Upperlandic is Dutch without the awful utility generally attached to that language. Upperlandic words and sentences look like their Dutch counterparts at first glance. But then, Upperlandic is meant for the second glance."Other chapters of the book include various wordplays such as palindromes, spoonerisms, the shortest possible sentence containing all letters, the shortest and longest possible words (and note that Dutch allows for word-chaining), chessboard poetry, anagrams, lengthy pieces of prose containing no vowel other than the e, or containing no "tall" letters as on a typewriter (e.g. oeain but not j or b) and so forth.
In 2002 the sequel, Opperlans! Taal- & letterkunde (intentional misspelling) was printed. Because the chapters in this new version were even more mystifying, in 2007 another book "Opperlans woordenboek" was released to let people find out what the actual question was. It's in fact just a list of Opperlandic words with reference to the big book - and some new words.