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How did Rembrandt's language sound?

Hoe klonk de taal van Rembrandt?

For the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt's death, researchers developed a series of Rembrandt Tutorials where Rembrandt "himself" teaches how to paint. These Tutorials are on YouTube. To be realistic, they used the Dutch language as spoken in the 15th century, and even reconstructed, as best they could, how Rembrandt's actual voice would probably have sounded.

The story of the preparation of these tutorials also contains links to the Tutorials themselves.

Rembrandt Tutorials

Wow! That is utterly fascinating! Thanks for telling us about it, tommus!

I'm extra happy about, that I not only could read the article with quite good understanding, but even get the gist of the "De ‘making-of’ van de Rembrandt Tutorials" without reading the subtitles - without ever having learnt any Dutch. (Except a little Clozemaster for a few weeks.) German as a native language makes Dutch almost (but not entirely) transparent. I think, I could acquire an okay reading ability without too much work. Should buy a dictionary and a beginners' grammar and check the library for some nice Dutch books.

The Night Watch: Rijksmuseum's high tech photo

Here is a BBC article and a link to a new technology to display Rembrandt's The Night Watch (De Nachtwacht) in amazing detail (hyper-resolution). It is as if you were standing in front of the painting with a magnifying glass.

BBC article

Direct link to Nachtwacht

Dutch Wikipedia article about De Nachtwacht

Thanks for publishing the link to the reconstruction of the speech of mynheer Rembrandt van Rijn. It is actually hard to find genuine texts from his era even though it was one of the most glorious golden ages any country has been able to muster so hearing a reconstructed voice from that time was even more unexpected. I was however surprised that the short speech à la 'Rembrandt* wasn't more oldfashioned (and guttural), and that it was so easy to understand it. But I was also slightly surprised at the voice itself. Maybe it should illustrate Rembrandt's voice from a late period in his life and maybe his teeth weren't quite as complete then as in his younger days, but the voice I heard suggested that he had a lisp and also that he may have had a tendency to spit and wiggle his upper lip when talking, and he may have sounded differently in his younger years. But now that the methodology has been developed it may be used on other famous persons from the time, including young Rembrandt.

Btw: Long ago I got my Dutch listening breakthrough (epiphany) by listening for five hours to AVRO Museum TV in Dutch (the site still exists, but has changed a lot). This time the fun was over after just a few minutes, but I noticed and bookmarked the link to Nemo Kennislink near the bottom of the page, and then I can listen some more to small scientific lectures in Dutch.

This is a really interesting article about Rembrandt's Nachtwacht. The painting in its original measures is even more stunning.

https://nos.nl/artikel/2386263-nachtwacht-tijdelijk-te-zien-zoals-rembrandt-hem-had-bedoeld

That article on the NEMO Kennislink site is really interesting. Especially all the language reconstruction. The difference between 'hij zat te schildren' and 'hij zat en schilderde' is worth thinking about. I found it hard to reconcile the two at first because 'zitten te' really is used as a form of 'is':

Ik zit te eten = I'm eating; hij zat eten = he was eating; wat zit je te doen? = what are you doing?; zij zit te huilen = she is crying....etc

It's a positional verb used as 'is', which Dutch learners here in this thread will know is very common in Dutch. But I thought: 'can "hij zat en schilderde" mean the same?' I think probably yes.

Two things about the video at the bottom of that page. The narrator's voice is grating with that Gooise 'r'!

Also Jonathan Bikker (though his last name sounds Dutch) has the tell-tale signs of an English native speaking Dutch,. However he also has adopted some real Amsterdam- speech sounds such as the diphthongisation of the double 'oo' in gewoon making it sound like 'gewui-en' and he does the same thing with 'grootste'. So he's obviously always in contact with people who speak like this. The same sounds are found in 'Plat Utrechts' and other working-class vernacular speech..'vrij basaal' (pretty basic) as the guy following Bikker described it. Interesting too for this video is that Bikker's rendering of 'ij' is closer to how they said Rembrandt said it: 'ai'.