The Dutch 'letter' IJ (2001) | Hacker News Reader

The Dutch 'letter' IJ (2001)

rudhar.com

41 pointspickledcods27 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I recently distributed laptops to politicians and the first step in the setup process is choosing the keyboard layout. Nearly half of the people were already selecting "Dutch" before I could tell them we don't actually use that for the keyboard layout. We Dutch people are all using the US (international with dead keys) keyboard layout nowadays. There's no need for any special Dutch keys.

In many languages the task of a typesetter is inserting ligatures for when the author’s manuscript had simply written two separate letters. I wonder if the same is true of modern Dutch publishing, even if ordinary people write i+j.

Afrikaans seems to have done fine with just giving up on this letter/sequence of letters entirely.

Most of it is just handled by selecting the proper font, which automatically gives you the proper ligature.

The interesting thing is that Afrikaans actually went the opposite direction as Dutch. Prior to 1863 Dutch used 'y' and 'ij' pretty much interchangeably, but a spelling reform made 'ij' the official spelling in Dutch. However, Afrikaans seems to have settled on 'y' and 'i', leading to things like the Dutch word 'tijd' being spelled 'tyd' in Afrikaans.

I think this reflects a cultural phenomenon. Dutch people are very pragmatic when it comes to language. This is also seen in how easily loan words are introduced, especially from English these days, compared to say, French or German people.

Also compare it to Belgium. The Flemmish people speak Dutch but they are much more "pure" about the language. Where the Dutch will simply use loan words from English or other languages, the Flemmish try to invent new Dutch words.

At the same time, I have increasingly witnessed Dutch and Flemish young people using English when they talk to each other – this will usually be explained by the Dutch side as due to their lack of comfort with Flemish, but I think it is simply a result of how highly online young people are these days – highly online in English – and I suspect that bodes badly for the future of purist attitudes even among the Flemish.

I see that lack of comfort also with Flemish people. I have a Flemish neighbour (in her 50s) in Spain and while I'm Dutch I tried speaking it with her but she always switches to Spanish for some reason.

But when I go to Holland these days I hear people speaking a mixture of English and Dutch on the streets. Very American-influenced English though with an accent and some expressions used improperly (I lived in Ireland a long time so I'm more used to British)

It does appear that the language is dying or at least changing. I don't mind though. Languages are meant to be fluid. Trying to be a purist is to try and push back the sea.

> Trying to be a purist is to try and push back the sea.

You mean, the thing where Dutch people are absolute world champions at? :-D

Flemish Dutch is actually full of loan words from French. E.g. a holiday is "congé", a truck is "camion", a trailer is "remorque", a jackhammer is "piqueur", a total loss is "perte totale", a grilled cheese sandwich is "croque-monsieur"...

On the other hand an electrician is an "electriker" in Flemish and "electricien" in Dutch :)

The same goes for Afrikaans to some extent, i.e. many words in it are a more purist version of Dutch, whereas Dutch itself adopted some loan word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Afrikaans_and_Du...

I have a hunch (nothing more than that) that Dutch linguists (to keep their jobs relevant?) helped in making people care less about the language. By continuously changing grammar and spelling rules. The Dutch I learned in school is very different than what you have now, and I wouldn't be able to pass an exam without relearning the whole grammar.

We also have this (rather popular) grammar contest on TV, called "Het Groot Dictee der Nederlandse taal", that seemed designed to only appeal to linguistic purists. With ridiculous sentences that bring orgasms to language elites. Especially the 2013 version [0] by Kees van Kooten was called a "sadistical language experiment" by De Volkskrant newspaper.

Those frequent changes and the TV show made me decide I do not care a single bit about getting the grammar/spelling correct, and I'll just invent own constructs and adopt any slang, if they are fun.

[0] https://archief.ntr.nl/grootdictee/2014/05/27/dicteetekst-20...

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

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

It used to be its own letter.

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

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/

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

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?

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