The Dutch 'letter' IJ (2001)

The Dutch 'letter' IJ (2001)(rudhar.com)

41 points by pickledcods 2 years ago | 27 comments

tmtvl 2 years ago |

Some thoughts from a Flem:

I was taught that the letter y is called "ypsilon" (pronounced "ipsilon") and met a fair few people who call it "ygrec". It seems like people here used to call it "Griekse ij" but that nomenclature fell out of favour.

The combinations "ei" and "ij" make the same sound, and we tend to call them respectively "korte (short) ei" and "lange (long) ij", though there is no difference in pronunciation between, for example, "leiden" (to lead) and "lijden" (to suffer).

I personally wouldn't consider "ij" to be a single letter any more than I would consider "ei", "eu", or "ui" to be a single letter. Though unlike the author I would prefer spacing out the letters individually as:

  r e i s t i j d

rather than:

  r ei s t ij d

even though I have noticed crossword puzzles tend to put "ij" (and only "ij") in a single square.

throwaway_4638 2 years ago | |

Actually there is a (nearly imperceptible) difference between the pronunciation of ei and ij, at least in my local region. For the "ij" sound the tongue is pushed into a slightly narrower bowl in the middle, while on the "ei" sound there is no tension on the tongue at all.

wjnc 2 years ago | | |

For me as well. Dutch Brabant. The ‘ei’ has a shorter tongue movement than the ‘ij’. I’ve tried several words and my tongue doesn’t reach my bottom jaw as hard in ‘ei’ as in ‘ij’. Can’t hear myself though. “In Leiden lijden lijsters leidzaam.” First and last feel more alike than the middle two.

I do love these minute and local details of linguistics and history. We look at Chinese as a hard language because of the sounds influencing meaning while having (trivially!) nuanced examples as well.

Don’t get me started on Greek / Roman / Germanic heritage of words and sounds. I love this.

arp242 2 years ago |

I think this is a bit of a generational thing, with older people considering ij a letter, and younger don't, "younger" being under 40/50 or so. I'm approaching 40 and I was never taught to see ij as a letter, and always considered it to be the same as eu, ou, ei, and so forth: two letters that make a single sound (digraph).

The y doesn't occur in Dutch words, only in loanwords, and while loanwords with a y are relatively common now, I suppose most are also fairly new (as in: last 100 years or so), which would explain the generational difference.

I also think it's fine to just capitalize the I: Ijsland instead of IJsland. I suspect this will be the norm 50 years from now.

crote 2 years ago | |

The funny part is that 'y' used to be quite common in Middle Dutch as a variant of 'ij' or 'i'. This resulted in words like 'anys' (now 'anijs'), 'Leyden' (now 'Leiden'), 'ghelyc' (now 'gelijk'), and 'waerheyt' (now 'waarheid'). It was simply an alternative spelling. This was officially abolished with a spelling reform in 1863, with it only being allowed in loan words.

> I also think it's fine to just capitalize the I: Ijsland instead of IJsland. I suspect this will be the norm 50 years from now.

Nope, this just looks wrong to me and the spelling rules do not allow it. It is written as a single letter, so it should be capitalized as a single letter.

airza 2 years ago | |

Dutch is not my first language but I play wordfeud in it sometimes; I was surprised to eventually infer that the Y was not used in any native words but still available in the bag. It's been a real challenge to use it to play the ~4 loan words I know that use it.

wkat4242 2 years ago |

I think the ligature has just disappeared in favor of 'ij' because in Holland we use American keyboards. There used to be a special Dutch keyboard layout but simply using the American ones was cheaper. They lack the accents, the old florin sign and ligatures we have like the 'ij' and the paragraph sign. So we ended up using those less and less. Now I never write accents anymore in Dutch. And good riddance.

Pet_Ant 2 years ago |

I mean in English “th” ceally should be it’s own letter. It really has nothing to do with a “t” or an “h” and really should thought of as a single letter that just looks like two others. In many fonts, it really is because it’s a common ligature for aesthetic reasons.

Muximize 2 years ago | |

It used to be its own letter in Old English, and in Icelandic it still is: þ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

sneed_chucker 2 years ago | |

It used to be its own letter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

throwaway_4638 2 years ago | |

> It really has nothing to do with a “t” or an “h”

The placement of the tongue is exactly between those two letters. Makes perfect sense to me. No need for an extra letter just for that.

OfSanguineFire 2 years ago | | |

> The placement of the tongue is exactly between those two letters.

That is not the origin of the digraph "th" (and also I would suggest picking up an introductory textbook of phonetics, because you’re way off). The digraph comes from the fact that in Classical Greek the unvoiced dental stop denoted by the letter theta was pronounced with aspiration, but in Latin the native dental stop denoted by the letter T was pronounced without aspiration. Therefore, when the Romans had to represent Greek words with theta in their own alphabet, they added an H after the T to mark the aspiration.

klkvsk 2 years ago |

Curious, is this what inspired JetBrains to include such ligature in writing "IntelliJ", merging iJ? [1]

They embeded it in their own font in an interesting way: the ligature only works for whole "Intelli" + "J", not just any "i" + "j".

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/ru-ru/idea/

acadapter 2 years ago |

Hungarian has "dzs", a three-symbol letter, and lots of two-symbol letters, if you want a more extreme example.

TacticalCoder 2 years ago |

Was this official on documents? For example did ID cards in the Netherlands (and Belgium) used to have "ij" shown as a ligature? And now they don't anymore?