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As a native Dutch speaker I would disagree with what you wrote about the 'ij'-ligature. It's definitely not considered a single letter and I don't recall ever s

As a native Dutch speaker I would disagree with what you wrote about the 'ij'-ligature. It's definitely not considered a single letter and I don't recall ever seeing it written as 'ÿ' or 'Ü'.

coldpie 11y ago
I've never seen it with the dots, but you do see y and a broken-U fairly often. Examples, including y with dots, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29
- pluma 11y ago
  Agreeed. I may have remembered the uppercase form wrong. You're probably right that it was a "broken" U rather than a U with dots.
pluma 11y ago
I'm not sure whether it's a Belgian or Dutch thing and what the context is, but I've seen it written as something very similar to ÿ (both in handwriting and in print) and I've also seen variants of a broken Ü as uppercase ligature. I'm not saying it's particularly widespread or widely accepted, but I've seen it in real-world use by native speakers. For all I know it was just a stylistic choice or very experimental, but the same could be said about German uppercase SZ (ẞ -- vs the lowercase ß) and that one even has its own Unicode codepoint (although most people pretend it doesn't exist). It doesn't seem too surprising either. German umlauts for example evolved a lot throughout fairly recent history (by European standards) -- we used to have a tiny superscript "e" instead of the two dots. EDIT: To clarify: I was apparently wrong about the uppercase version (doesn't seem to have dots) but the case for ÿ seems pretty solid.
elros 11y ago
Check out any of Dijkstra's handwritten papers. He uses this variation when signing his own name.
- bluerobotcat 11y ago
  I couldn't immediately find an image of that, but in cursive 'ij' would look quite similar to 'ÿ', I guess.
antientropic 11y ago
I was definitely taught to write it as a single letter, and that seems to be fairly traditional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29#/media/File:Leesplankje_van_Hoogeveen_%282%29.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29#/media/File:L...
- bluerobotcat 11y ago
  Those combinations are phonemes, nothing more. Addendum: The letters 'i' and 'j' look distinct (though very close) to me in that image. At first I thought it was just weird 'kerning', but the caption seems to say it's a single glyph. That doesn't need to mean it's a single letter though; it can merely be a ligature. Upon further reflection, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by being thought to write them as a single letter. I was only thought cursive in school and I'm not sure what difference it would make to write them as one or two letters in cursive.

As a native Dutch speaker I would disagree with what you wrote about the 'ij'-ligature. It's definitely not considered a single letter and I don't recall ever seeing it written as 'ÿ' or 'Ü'.

coldpie 11y ago

I've never seen it with the dots, but you do see y and a broken-U fairly often. Examples, including y with dots, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29

pluma 11y ago
Agreeed. I may have remembered the uppercase form wrong. You're probably right that it was a "broken" U rather than a U with dots.

pluma 11y ago

I'm not sure whether it's a Belgian or Dutch thing and what the context is, but I've seen it written as something very similar to ÿ (both in handwriting and in print) and I've also seen variants of a broken Ü as uppercase ligature. I'm not saying it's particularly widespread or widely accepted, but I've seen it in real-world use by native speakers. For all I know it was just a stylistic choice or very experimental, but the same could be said about German uppercase SZ (ẞ -- vs the lowercase ß) and that one even has its own Unicode codepoint (although most people pretend it doesn't exist). It doesn't seem too surprising either. German umlauts for example evolved a lot throughout fairly recent history (by European standards) -- we used to have a tiny superscript "e" instead of the two dots. EDIT: To clarify: I was apparently wrong about the uppercase version (doesn't seem to have dots) but the case for ÿ seems pretty solid.

elros 11y ago

Check out any of Dijkstra's handwritten papers. He uses this variation when signing his own name.

bluerobotcat 11y ago
I couldn't immediately find an image of that, but in cursive 'ij' would look quite similar to 'ÿ', I guess.

antientropic 11y ago

I was definitely taught to write it as a single letter, and that seems to be fairly traditional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29#/media/File:Leesplankje_van_Hoogeveen_%282%29.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29#/media/File:L...

bluerobotcat 11y ago
Those combinations are phonemes, nothing more. Addendum: The letters 'i' and 'j' look distinct (though very close) to me in that image. At first I thought it was just weird 'kerning', but the caption seems to say it's a single glyph. That doesn't need to mean it's a single letter though; it can merely be a ligature. Upon further reflection, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by being thought to write them as a single letter. I was only thought cursive in school and I'm not sure what difference it would make to write them as one or two letters in cursive.