Talk:IJ (digraph)

It is referred to as the 'long Y' in the Dutch language, and contrasts with the 'short Y' ei, which in most dialects is pronounced identically. The letter Y only occurs in loanwords…

That statement is misleading or at least confusing; there is no reason to replace IJ by Y here.
—Herbee 13:24, 2004 Mar 18 (UTC)

More clear now I hope. — Jor (Darkelf) 13:56, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That was quick, Darkelf. Is there any particular reason why the article's title should be 'Dutch Y' and not 'Dutch IJ'? Would you mind if I move it?
—Herbee 21:15, 2004 Mar 18 (UTC)

When I needed a title for this article I chose 'Dutch Y', because in Dutch it is just called the "IJ", and replaces the Y as a letter of the alphabet. Other possible titles are 'IJ ligature', and of course 'Dutch IJ'. No objection to moving it (keeping a redirect from 'Dutch Y'). — Jor (Darkelf) 21:45, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

As far as I know (and I'm a native speaker), the ij in vrolijk is always pronounced as a schwa, and never as ii. The ij in the word bijzonder is pronounced as ii, but it is also the only case I know of. So probably this needs to be refined, or another example of &#307 being pronounced as ii in standard Dutch has to be found (except of course for words als bijzonderheid).--Berteun 12:50, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Well, the ij in vrolijk sounds like schwa, however in sound it's more close to i (as in knights who say ni) than to ei. If you listen to sound records from before the 60's, then you'll sometimes hear people say vrolik and also in older writings you can find it written as vrolik, like you can find schrikte. (my apologees, only Dutch and people who studied Dutch might understand this and then perhaps even those wouldn't if they haven't seen older literature). Also in Flemish you'll still hear vrolik... however it it not pronounced as vroliek (vroliik), of course. Frenzie 17:34, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

The article opens with "IJ (also IJ)", but on my system, with the default font the two are rendered identically, as though it said, "IJ (also IJ)", which looks pretty silly. Just letting you know. --Furrykef 00:25, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Template:Wrongtitle's title

What is the difference (besides the dis-ambiguation suffix) between the article's title and what the message claims to be the correct title?? Georgia guy 20:05, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

IJ are two letters, I+J. ij is a single letter. Try selecting them. Jordi·✆ 20

09, 7 May 2005 (UTC)

More specifically: ij are two Unicode characters, i+j. ij is a single Unicode characters. That's a technical matter.

Wether ij (or ij or handwritten) constitutes 1 or 2 letters, is a matter of some debate. I would like to see more of that debate than just a reference to the Winkler Prins in the first paragraph, arguing in 1 direction (that IJ is considered by most native speakers to be 1 letter). Van Dale argues notably in the other direction.

The same POV bias is repeated in the section Sorting:

No matter how it is sorted, or if the ligature or i+j is used, in Dutch it remains one letter (...) This rule is however not always followed: some Flemings do not consider IJ to be a letter, and consequently IJ is not consistently capitalized, resulting in spellings like Ijsvrij. This is however not standard usage, and incorrect in standard Dutch.

I agree that the capitalisation Ij is not standard usage, and wrong, but that does not necessarily imply that ij is most definetely one letter, and not considering it to be one letter is wrong.

– Adhemar 21:03, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

The title can be considered POV, since not everybody considers the digraph a letter, not even among Dutch speakers. IJ (alledged letter) would be kind of stupid. But should we rename (move) to IJ (ligature), or better yet, IJ (digraph)? – Adhemar 08:57, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't see any objections, so I moved to IJ (digraph) – Adhemar 18:44, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

IJ was a ligature like w and ß was. That just origin. Now it is a letter. This 'IJ (digraph)' is stupid only Belgians believe in.

About the letter IJ: Some, especially Flemish people, deny the existence of the letter ij. But every Dutch child learns about this letter (see the word 'gijs' on the Dutch 'leesplankje'), so it is silly not to talk about the letter ij. On the Dutch wikipedia, there is an annoying thing going on, people trying to push their personal conviction as fact. The latest succes of the opponents is to rename the entry from ij (letter) to ij (digraph), as if you can make something disappear if you refuse to mention it. The fact is, this is an article about a letter, about how people write, not about typesetters and how they handle things like 'fl' and 'fi'. If you want to talk about pink elephants, you have to call it pink elephants, even if there are some people who are convinced that pink elephants should be eliminated. So change the title back to ij (letter). Its status is comparable to letters like ß, å and ø, even though they, indeed like the letter w, have an origin in the combination of two letters, and are not used in all applicable writing systems. For instance, the ß is not used in Swiss German. Likewise, ij is not fully recognised as a letter in Flanders, but nevertheless, to millions of people it does exist. 82.93.232.101 11:23, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Get rid of the digraph?

I propose that we simply not use the digraph character and just use the letters I and J to spell IJ. The two are going to be rendered identically in most fonts anyway, which ties into the "wrongtitle" thing above, mainly, it may well not make any sense until you look at the wiki code or until you try to select one of the two characters only to find it's one character. Of course we could still note that there's a Unicode codepoint for it. - furrykef (Talk at me) 12:26, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Origins of IJ

In medieval times, before the letter j emerged as a distinct letter, a series of letters i in Roman numerals was commonly ended with a flourish; hence they actually looked like ij, iij, iiij, etc. This proved useful in preventing fraud, as it was impossible, for example, to add another i to vij to get viij. This practice is now merely an antiquarian's note; it is never used. (It did, however, lead to the Dutch diphthong IJ.)

IJ and Unicode

The IJ ligature in Unicode is only intended to be compatible with legacy processing systems. Since Wikipedia isn't a legacy processing system, the IJ ligature should not be used in the wikipedia article.

From Unicode 4.0 standard, page 71-72:

• Compatibility decomposable characters are a subset of compatibility characters included in the Unicode Standard to represent distinctions in other base standards. They support transmission and processing of legacy data. Their use is discouraged other than for legacy data or other special circumstances.

• Replacing a compatibility decomposable character by its compatibility decomposition may lose round-trip convertibility with a base standard.

The title of this article should probably be changed back to IJ. Or does this cause problems like the previous ``wrongtitle? What do you think?

Handwriting

It says: in the handwriting of most Dutch speakers ÿ and ij are identical. I don't think that is correct. Look at these typical examples: http://www.xs4all.nl/~pkleiweg/ln/2004a/038.html The first word bijou has two letters i and j. The second word ijs has one letter ij, and the word yoghurt has one letter y. -- 213.84.55.218 23:02, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

My ij and y are clearly different (as on the example you linked to), only the ij is so into my system that I often write the y as ij and can only just keep myself from adding the dots. But that is a mistake and rather the opposite of what the i-grec is. Frenzie 17:34, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

long IJ vs Short IJ

If it is noted that the name is ij lange (long ij) to distinguish it from short ij, I think that the transcription shall be with long sign (:) as [e:ɪ] not only [eɪ].

Please answer to me also at my catalan user talk. THANKS
—Ludor 15:12, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Short answer: the names are based on the letter form, not the underlying sound (which is identical in most cases). Longer answer at your talk. Jordi·✆ 16:07, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, can someone please remove the term short 'ij', there is really no such thing, as every Dutch grammar teacher will teach you. There is the letter/digraph 'ij' and the digraph 'ei'. Talking about 'korte' and 'lange ij' is by some considered almost as dumb as not knowing the difference between 'kennen' and 'kunnen', therefore there shouldn't be a mention of it in a encyclopedia IMHO Remko2 21:12, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

In Alsatian?

Is the Dutch letter ij related to the 18th-century Alsatian German letter ÿ?

Did this letter exist in the dialect of German spoken in Alsace in the 1700's?

Some of my ancestors came from Alsace, and I did a lot of genealogical research. I can verify that the following spellings are quite clear in both printing and handwriting in the church record books in the late 1700's and very early 1800's:

• Xaverÿ ( = High German “Xaver”, English “Xavier”)
• Himerÿ ( = French “Himère”, High German “Immer” or “Imer”, Latin “Himerius”)
• Antonÿ ( = High German “Anton", English “Anthony”, Latin “Antonius”)
• Kirÿ (a surname)

The record-keepers occasionally forgot the umlaut and just wrote y instead of ÿ, but they never wrote it as ij.

To add to my confusion, one of the Alsatian record-keepers spelled the number zwei as zwiÿ on one occasion!

The Alsatian language article is just a stub and not very helpful. Lawrence King 07:23, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, Alsatian is an Alemannic dialect and in Alemannic the letter y (which developed from ÿ) stands for /i/ (ee). On the Alemannic wikipedia we recently found out that the y we use actually came from ij. The y is mostly used in Switzerland nowadays, I think most Alsatian writers use ii instead. That zwei is spelled zwiÿ is because iÿ once stood for ei. Hope that helps!--Chlämens 15:05, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

European rules for the use of the IJ in public records

The URL European rules for the use of the IJ in public records is not working; is there a good replacement? -- Psiphiorg 06:43, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Capital Y-umlaut?

The article says "In print (lowercase y with diaeresis) and ij look very different, but in the handwriting of most Dutch speakers ÿ and ij are identical. Fortunately, since the y occurs only in loanwords, the ÿ is extremely rare (if not altogether non-existent) in Dutch." My question is, where, if anywhere does y-umlaut occur, and can it be capitalized? These characters were in the Mac character set from day 1, and when I was working on handwriting recognitin I tried to figure out why; we went ahead and implemented them in the Newton OS 2.0 even though they didn't seem to be good for much. But in 1996 when I happened to visit the Old Church in Amsterdam, I saw what appeared to be a capital Y-umlaut, not IJ, carved in a floor grave stone. What's up with that? Does any language use such characters? Did old Dutch? Dicklyon 00:34, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

The ÿ is not used in Dutch, the letter you saw might just have been a random geometric shape. The few uses does have in other languages are described at de:ÿ. I don't trust the claim that it is used in [[Welsh], though. This might just be a mix up with ý. —Ruud 01:16, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

It wasn't a random shape; it was part of name -- too bad I don't have a photo. Anybody near the old church?

Centuries ago, or even decades ago, people were less pedantic about such things. It's quite possible that the author considered Ÿ and IJ to be the same, simply because in handwriting the difference is often not even noticeable. In recent Dutch texts, this mistake is rarely made. Also, in Afrikaans, a language related to Dutch, originating from the time when the Dutch colonised South-Africa, uses Ÿ where Dutch uses IJ. One could deduce that the difference between Ÿ and IJ was not considered important by those who brought Dutch to South-Africa.

P.S. "not used in Dutch" excludes the use of ÿ to replace ij by a few DOS programs. Stange that even ASCII includes this character. —Ruud 01:20, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

The Mac character set was an extension of ASCII. Why they included y-umlaut I'll never know. Dicklyon 02:23, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

ÿ is exceptionally used in French. Examples that come to mind are the composer Eugène Ysaÿe, and the locality L'Haÿ-les-Roses near Paris. More importantly, ÿ/Ÿ is used extensively in Afrikaans (where Dutch uses ij). – Adhemar 09:02, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

This last comment is not correct. y/Y is used in Afrikaans where Dutch uses ij, not ÿ/Ÿ. It's correct in the article, though – Adhemar

Just to be pedantic... Y umlaut never occurs. You mean Y with diaeresis. -- Jordi·✆ 12:33, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh, ÿ of little faith... :-) --Psiphiorg 18:06, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

bijectie

I think ij is a ligature and not a letter, because wether I write bijectie or ijs my ij stays the same and I allways write it as a ligature, never as two distinct letter. If ij be a ligature, shouldn't the ij in bijectie be a ligature? Because otherwise the word bijectie should look like "bi jectie" in writing?

I learned it as bi-jectie, never seen anyone write bijectie 85.145.103.163 14:45, 18 May 2007 (UTC)