 This artificial approach to the Dutch language remained the prevailing practice through the 17th and 18th centuries, but attitudes began to change in the 19th century.The rigidity of the written language was satirized in 1865 by Jacob van Lennep in his "De vermakelijke spraakkunst" ["The amusing art of language"], in which he noticed that the case system was hardly used in spoken language.The practice of approaching Dutch as if it were a classical, inflecting language comparable to Latin and Greek (or German) was gradually abandoned in the 19th century, and it was recognized that word order played a far greater role in defining grammatical relationships.