[NSR] ij vs. y

Speaking from Canada--you just don't see ij in English--it is changed to y

We moved to Canada in 1952- I was 2 -and my dad changed our name to BRUYN from BRUIJN
Today my Canadian passport has my Canadian spelling and my Dutch passport has my Dutch spelling--
This may be considered subversive in the USA so when I travel there I use my Can.

 

It is indeed done because of spelling. Cruijff is Cruijff's real name, but for his international business he uses Cruyff. van Nistelrooy I believe actually changed his name to Van Nistelrooy and I think Kuijt is just Kuijt's real name.

 

What I made out is that the old spelling was 'y', that's at least what all the buldings in Amsterdam are having. Most people type 'ij' nowadays, and that is what is used in the books I learn Dutch out of. For handwriting the Dutch people are used to write an 'ÿ' and still do that (even though it comes quite close to a 'ji')
So, what I make out of this thread is that for internationalisation many people change back to 'y'.

 

im too lazy to do it, but search these boards, there are a couple of threads on it (you may have to search a year or 2 back). they explain it very well.

 

In Dutch grammar ij is very normal. In non-Dutch languages it's very strange. Not to confuse foreigners some dutch people change their names into someting with Y instead of IJ. Cruijff is the best example of it. Originaly it is spelled with the "IJFF". To make it easier for foreigners he changed the IJ for Y. Now it's Cruyff.
So it's a Dutch service to foreigners. Nice people we are, aren't we!

(By the way, on Cruyff's website it is explained why he did the spell change. http://www.cruijff.com/hetfenomeen/cruijffanders/article3388881.ece
It's a bit too long to translate, it's all dutch, but English typewriters didn't have the IJ on their Typewriter and to make it easier ffor them Johan came with the Y.
Because off all these name changes also a lot of dutch people make a total mess of spelling his (and others) name (s) correctly!

 

Feijenoord changed the spelling some years ago into Feyenoord, because foreigners tried to pronounce it the way it is written, with some remarkable funny tongue injuries as a result.
We have in the Dutch language what we call the iGrec = y, the ij and the ei, all pronounced in the same way. Why we have ij and ei I donot know.
When you look in a Dutch dictionary you have to look in the i section for words spelled ij and in the e section for words spelled with ei.
It gets funny when you add to that the different ways the ij and ei are pronounced in different parts of the countrie. We do that to confuse non Dutch

 

Never mind the farmers, just listen to us from de Randstad.

 

How things came about.
In Middle Dutch (12th-15th centuries) the short and long varieties of vowels in closed syllables were rendered in writing by single and double symbols respectively. In accordance with this system, the short sound [ι], as in sit, was represented by the letter I, and the long sound [i:], as in see, by II. This representation was satisfactory until-during the 16th and 17th century - printers added two new symbols to the alphabet: J, formed by giving the Roman I a descender (or "tail"), and U, originally a graphic variant of the Roman V. As lower-case ii was easily confused with lower-case U, writers and printers took to dotting their Is and replacing the second one of a pair with a J. This resulted in IJ.

At the same time as this graphic innovation, a phonemic change took place. The sound [i:] went through a vowel shift, and gradually turned into the diphthong [εi] (close to English [ai], as in my). These simultaneous developments led to a chaotic situation, further aggravated by frequent confusion of IJ and Y. Absence of any ruling on the subject allowed authors and printers to go their own way until well into the 19th century. Stabilization was eventually achieved in the 1860s when the linguists De Vries and Te Winkel published a spelling system which appealed to the public at large, and was eventually laid down by law. Subsequent spelling reforms have left the notations for [εi] unchanged.

How things stand now.
Modern Dutch has three graphic representations for the sound [εi]:

(1) IJ as in rijm 'rhyme', fijn 'fine', hij 'he', zij 'she', mij 'me'.

(2) EI as in trein 'train', meid 'maid', hei 'heather', zei 'said', mei 'May'.

(3) Y as in de onbekende y 'the unknown Y', y-as 'y-axis', Y-chromosoom, the chemical symbol Y for yttrium, etc.

This is not to say that IJ is consistently pronounced [εi]. The most frequent exception is the suffix -lijk, as in vriendelijk 'friendly', where the vowel is reduced to a schwa. (Several spelling reformers have suggested *vriendelik or *vriendeluk but have had no success.) Other examples are bijzonder 'special' and dikwijls 'often' where the IJ likewise appears in an unstressed syllable.

The digraph EI, whose historical background is altogether different, will not be dealt with here. Suffice it to say that, thanks to the existence of two notations for the sound [εi], Dutch learners have to find their way through a maze of homophones (compare the last three examples given at (1) and (2) above).

The Y is only pronounced [εi] in scientific expressions, as shown under (3), and when called by its name (for instance, by children reciting the alphabet). Apart from these instances, it only occurs in loan words and foreign words, and is pronounced accordingly. Examples: Y sounds as [j] in yoghurt, as [ι] in lynchen, 'to lynch', as [i:] in jury, as [ai] in byte.

Note: Afrikaans has opted for Y instead of IJ. As a result, Y appears here in Germanic words, whereas the average Dutch speaker intuitively regards this letter as an 'alien' element. (Similar feelings exist about C, Q and X.)

Everyday problems.
Do the Dutch treat their IJ as two separate letters or rather as a composite symbol that somehow has no place in the alphabet? The question may seem academic, but becomes of practical relevance if you don't know whether IJ should occupy one or two squares in your Dutch crossword puzzle. (The answer is: one. Dutch Scrabble sets accordingly include a separate IJ tile.) Here are a few observations which suggest preference for one or the other view.

In favour of the separate-letters view
(a) There is no IJ in the Dutch alphabet.
(b) In Dutch dictionaries entries with initial IJ are listed as if the first letter were an I and the second a J. Thus you will find the entries ignoreren 'to ignore', ijdel 'vain', ijzer 'iron', ik 'I' in this order. Dutch atlases use the same system in their indexes. The convention also applies, of course, to non-initial IJs.

In favour of the composite-symbol view
(c) In Dutch telephone directories, names with initial IJ and initial Y are merged, and listed between X and Z. In train timetables the list of place-names is arranged in the same way, but in other reference books the entries may appear in the order either X-IJ-Y-Z or X-Y-IJ-Z. Still other variants exist. One well-known encyclopaedia has tried out four different systems in four successive editions.

(d) The combination IJ has its own name. It is called ij '[εi]' or, more specifically, lange ij 'long [εi]', or maybe we should translate it as 'tall [εi]' since the name refers not to any phonetic quality but to the elongated shape of the symbol, which distinguishes it from EI (sometimes called korte ei 'short [εi]') and from Y. The latter is called Griekse y 'Greek [εi]' or i-grec or, by children, ij zonder puntjes 'dotless [εi]'.

(e) Finally, there are a number of spelling and printing conventions. First, ij is capitalized as IJ, not as Ij (although there is some vacillation in Flanders). Second, when a word is letterspaced, no blank is inserted between i and j. So stijl 'style' becomes s t ij l, whereas steil 'steep' becomes s t e i l. Third, in end-of-line divisions, IJ is always left intact. And fourth, in compound words where a final I is followed by an initial J, the two letters are separated by a hyphen to prevent misreading. (Compounds are normally written solid in Dutch.) Examples: mini-jurk 'minidress', gummi-jas 'rubber coat'.

Well then, are we dealing with a letter, a digraph, a ligature, or just a homeless symbol? We don't know. All attempts to free Dutch IJ from its orthographic limbo have failed so far.

 

And offcourse the people from the Randstad area are as arrogant as usual!
Losers........

 

I'm not arrogant. Don't mix me up with the like of Bertje etc. As a matter of fact I like the Twenthe and Drenthe accent a lot. Come to think about it the Limburg and Brabant and Groningen too

 

Sorry man, i didn't want to insult you, i just wanted to piss of Bertje. Apologizes........

 

I like a Brabant accent on a girl a lot, though.

 

Okay, so what does the Dutch Alphabet look like? How many letters/caracters?

Wait, in essence is is the same except for IJ? so are there 27 letters?

 

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. That makes 26 letters. Both IJ and EI are made of two letters.

 

It should be the same as the English one, the IJ is not included. That makes it 26 letters as in the English and German alphabets. As the Germans, the Dutch use basically the English alphabet but use some other letters, which are not officialy included into the alphabet (German Ä,Ö,Ü,ß) plus some combinations of letters making differnt sounds (German: SCH, ACH, ICH, ST, SP; Dutch: CH). The IJ is somehow between that.
The Spanish for example at the other hand have included combination of other sounds in their alphabet (Ñ for example, but from what I learned in school also CH, LL and RR, even though Wikipedia says they are not included).

 

Who the hell ever needs to write ijsselmeer anyways?

 

IJ is one letter. But we still have 26 letters in the alphabet. Y and IJ are at the same place.

It indeed is confusing, because some dictionaries have the IJ under the I and others have it under the Y/IJ (like it should be in my opinion).

 

Because Ijsselmeer doesnot look as good as IJsselmeer

 

They should find another hobby

 

the more posts i read the more confusing it gets....did one of you mention that the ij is somtimes said as a short "u" for example: Lelijk (ugly) - (Pronounced- lay'luck)...