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Opperlandse taal- & letterkunde

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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 include various wordplays such as palindromes, spoonerisms, shortest possible sentence containing all letters, 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.

 


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