Hebban olla vogala

Hebban olla vogala, sometimes spelled hebban olla uogala, are the first three words of an 11th-century text fragment written in Old Dutch. The fragment was discovered in 1932 on the flyleaf of a manuscript that was probably made in the abbey of Rochester, Kent and is kept in Oxford.^[1] It is usually considered to represent a West Flemish variant of Old Low Franconian. The fragment is often incorrectly cited as being the oldest specimen of the Dutch language; it is, however, one of the oldest known sentences in western Old Dutch.^[2]

The complete text, a probatio pennae or " scribble" by a monk to try out his pen, is usually transcribed as Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic enda thu wat unbidan we nu. This is a word-for-word translation of the Latin sentence written directly above it: Abent^[3] omnes uolucres nidos inceptos nisi ego et tu quid expectamus nu(nc). It is roughly translated as: "Have all birds begun nests, except me and you - what are we waiting for?" (Modern Dutch: Zijn alle vogels nesten begonnen, behalve ik en jij. Waarop wachten we nu?)

In this comparison similar Modern Dutch and Modern English words (in form and meaning) are chosen to compare them with the Old Dutch equivalents in the sentence. The Dutch sentence is a correct one, although the verb 'begonnen' is usually conjugated with 'zijn' (be) and not with 'hebben' (have). For English the word order had to be adjusted. For 'hinase' and 'unbidan' there are no close matches in either language.

The form hinase corresponds morphologically to Modern Dutch tenzij^[4] ("unless", from het en zij) and does not seem to have a Modern English cognate.

The text is usually considered West Flemish; the arguments in favour of this view were advanced by Schönfeld (1933).^[5] According to his interpretation, *agunnan, hinase and (as he read it) anda are Ingvaeonic forms whose presence might be expected in any of the coastal dialects of Old Frisian, Old Saxon or Old Frankish. However, the -n of third person plural hebban, which is absent in both Anglo-Saxon and Frisian, identifies the language as Old Dutch. (Old High German habent uses a different stem.) nestas is the plural of a masculine nest that is attested in Middle Dutch and is still present in West Flemish. vogala has an epenthetic vocal of a type also found in certain Old Ghentish words, whereas Anglo-Saxon has fuglas. olla is the result of a vowel shift a > o before ll that is thought to have occurred in West Flemish at a very early date, possibly before 900. Finally, hagunnan and hi(c) have a prothetic h; according to Schönfeld, this also points to West Flemish, in which the h is frequently dropped or (in written language) added before vowels (cf. abent in the Latin version).

According to professor nl [Luc De Grauwe] of the University of Ghent, the text could equally well be Old English, more specifically Old Kentish.^[6][7]

Recently, professor Frits van Oostrom of Utrecht University linked it to the Moorish Kharjas genre, which includes verses sung by women to their absent lovers. He concludes that the fragment was probably written by a woman or from a female perspective.^[8]

• Dutch Language
• Gruuthuse manuscript
• History of Dutch