Language pride or language pessimism?

How pathetic and downtrodden the Dutch language has become at the beginning of the third millennium. A twenty-second-century European would certainly look back in utter surprise at the pitiful, almost shamefaced way in which the Dutch were accustomed to discuss the fate of their national language in the world of culture and science a century earlier. By 2015, much had apparently changed since, 400 years earlier, in the first decades of the Dutch Golden Age, the Amsterdam Chambers of Rhetoric, known as d’Eglantier (Sweet Briar) or In Liefde Bloeyende (Blossoming in Love), had made a fiery plea to ‘help, embellish and enrich’ Low German (Nederduyts), the basis of present-day Dutch; or since 1586 when the engineer and linguistic purist Simon Stevin (1548–1620) had sung the praises of ‘the dignity of the duytsche [i.e. Dutch] language’. But especially since Johannes Goropius Becanus (Jan van Gorp from Hilvarenbeek, 1518/1519–1572) used etymological reasoning in his book about the origin of Antwerp (1569) to identify proudly ‘Cimbrisch’ or ‘Duyts’, that is to say what we now call Dutch, as the oldest and most perfect language of the world, the language of paradise itself, the lingua adamica. Abraham van der Myl (Mylius,1563–1637) in his academic treatise Lingua Belgica (Leiden, 1612) agreed with him.