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8h25m
The Dutch digraph ij originated from the same custom. Originally written ii, later ij, and pronounced as a long i (English "ee"), the sound later shifted to be similar to English "eye", see the Dutch names for the cities Berlijn and Parijs. Meanwhile, the long i sound is now written as ie. IJ is the only Dutch digraph that tends to be treated as a single letter and is capitalized as such. In education in the Netherlands it is taught as the 25th letter instead of y, which does not occur in native Dutch words, and in the phone book it used to be sorted together (mixed) with y. But since the advent of computers it is generally sorted as i followed by j. There are a few place names like Ysselsteyn where Y is pronounced as IJ.
I'm pretty sure I was taught the letter y (I-grec) as part of the alfabet and not the ij (I'm Dutch as well). The other day I was surprised to see that an alfabet song that my kid was watching used the ij instead of the y. And I thought you were talking about IJsselstein, but saw there's indeed also Ysselsteyn, and they're not the same town (though pronounced the same). Interestingly we've then 3 ways to write the same sound (though y can also be pronounced as 'ee', e.g. Yvonne); y, ij, ei, oh, and I suppose 'ey' should be counted as well though that's not used in modern spelling. Cool
One of the things that blew my mind when I took a few semesters of Dutch in college is that the language occasionally gets amended (or more precisely, the way it's taught in schools is amended, although after a generation or two of delay the effects are the same) to fix inconsistencies. I can't remember if clarifying 'ij' and 'y' was one of those, but I remember the professor telling us about how a while back people were upset when they updated the spelling of the word "pannenkoek" (which I think had previously been spelled "pannekoek"), which some people apparently still haven't gotten over after almost three decades[1].
I wish there were enough willpower for something similar for English, but it's probably too late to reach any sort of compromise on whether to use a "u" in words like "color"/"colour".
[1]: https://dutchreview.com/news/dutch-government-argue-over-spe...
Well, I think the difference is that for Dutch, people are mostly colocated, i.e. share the same space and have a national curriculum to guide the use.
For English, it's quite different because many countries list it as their official language but may have diverged spellings and meanings and there is no single body to direct the curriculum. The most notable is the US vs. British English and the u in colo(u)r is a mere spelling example. Consider surgery or elevator, which are bigger discrepancies. I remember from my school days, as a non-native speaker, these were much more troublesome and we had a special test just to check we could tell which is which in US and GB English.
I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy.
English has no "boss" in charge of how the language works and who decides what the correct anything for the language is. The closest are style guides, but they come from multiple organisations and each often different to each other. So, it's harder to just decide that something will be spelt differently.
Indeed, that was what I was trying to say, but you put it more accurately. Thanks!
The US doesn't have an official language, though most institutions operate primarily in English, and all US states that have one or more official languages include English on that list.
The French do something similar, as do the Germans. They've had relatively little luck with substantial changes recently, though. The 1990 French reforms were rather trivial. For example. the placement of the diaeresis was shifted to the first vowel in some digraphs. So "aiguë" (acute, sharp) is now "aigüe" since it is two syllables, but the former spelling misleadingly hints at three syllables. That one seems to have been well-accepted. Many of the other reforms have been only partially accepted, or explicitly rejected by many speakers. (I don't think I am ever going to get used to "ognon" for onion.)
My Mum is an Australian Yvonne and married my Dutch father Jan. When we spent a whole year in the Netherlands back in 1971, Dutch acquaintances would always pronounce her name something like Yuh-vonna, quite different to how in English it is said like Ee-vonn. (My Dad's name is pronounced like Yun of course)
And yes as a 7 year old Aussie it was interesting learning that the digram "ij" was the 25th letter on the Dutch alphabet
I know several Yvonne's and we'd all pronounce it Ee-vonna.
Very interesting. An example that users of this forum will be familiar with is Edsger Dijkstra.
Does this mean the correct pronunciation is "deekstra"?
It’s more like dye-kstra. But that would still be wrong. It’s a sound that doesn’t exist in English.
Daikstra - you can pronounce this
Dijkstra - a sound in between you cannot pronounce coming from English
Diekstra - you can pronounce this too
In IPA, the name is /dɛikstra/. Americans (English vowels vary quite extremely by dialect/accent, so I'm sticking with Standard American English) can easily pronounce ɛ, we say the word 'bed' as /bɛd/.
But the 'ɛi' is a dipthong, and we don't have that dipthong. We have aɪ, as in 'bride' /bɹaɪd/, which is what usually comes out, at least for those of us who know that /dʒɪkstɹə/ is not even close to right. What you'll hear is generally something like /daɪkstɹə/, which make sense, as we pronounce 'dike' /daɪk/ as well.
So yes, completely correct, I just wanted to add the IPA for clarity.
To my understanding, most American and British English dialects[0] have /eɪ/, e.g. in "maze", which I imagine is quite close to /ɛi/.
[0] The exceptions being dialects where it monophthongizes to /eː/
"monophthongizes" Heck of a word is that.
hey, I don't make the rules :-P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthongization
Dutch /e/ has the tendency to become /eɪ/ as well (not in Flemish, I think), so /eɪ/ just sounds mostly like "e" to us (Dutch speakers in NL). The "ij" is really /ɛɪ/, but because we don't really have /aɪ/, it turns out that /aɪ/ works fine as a fairly non-ambiguous substitute.
no, daykstra. In the dutch of the middle-ages it might have been deekstra
Don't forget the river IJ, sounds like "eye"
Is it "eye" or "ey"? I remember "destijl" pronounced "de steyl" and not "de style".
And the windmill-brewery in AMS, Brouwerij 't IJ.
And then kids in Amsterdam pronounce it now as I anyway
A local theme park as a "dutch quarter" and I as a kid was always fascinated by one booth having a letter "ÿ" in the name. I later learned that it was some kind of alternativ spelling for ij, and if you spell ij in black letters its really easy to see why that might have occured.
It's also quite common in handwriting; ij in cursive looks exactly like ÿ, and even when the letters aren't all joined, that is a common ligature. When I studied Flemish as part of the integration course, all of the teachers wrote ÿ, and so I presumed that it was just the done thing.
30 years ago I knew a very old Swiss woman who told me they used the ‘letter’ ij (“yotee” if I remember correctly) instead of just a j (j in Swiss/German makes a y sound, like in jawohl). Hoping a Swiss person can fill in the details.
There is no standard writing system for Swiss German. So she might have used it, but it would be unclear to most Swiss what it means/how it should be pronounced.
Haha I was going to make a snarky comment that xij is done to make it look more Dutch, but its actually true!
In Zeeuws (a Dutch dialect) many words in standard Dutch with an "ij" are pronounced as "ee" and written as "ie". So not everything has changed everywhere. (e.g. Dijk is Diek)