4 ms·
> In Dutch, the letter is either only found in loanwords, or is practically equivalent to the digraph IJ. I speak dutch and I don't understand why in Unicode a
by Aardwolf 3y ago
> In Dutch, the letter is either only found in loanwords, or is practically equivalent to the digraph IJ.
I speak dutch and I don't understand why in Unicode a special character for IJ exists.
I and J are separate letters on Dutch keyboards and typewriters.
If you write them by hand, it's exactly the same as when you write an i followed by a j.
I could understand that a ligature in some fonts could exist, but not why a Unicode character does.
Also, there are many such Dutch sounds made by two letters (ei, eu, ou, oe, etc...) and those don't get their own Unicode character either (and that's good). There's nothing special about ij I see that makes that one warrant different treatment.
- mminer237 3y agoI can't really say why, but that's not the only ligature in Unicode. (œ actually is one too.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)#Ligatures_in_Unicode_(Latin_alphabets) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)#Ligatures_i...
- Aardwolf 3y agoœ is not used in Dutch, while oe is. The o and the e are never stuck together like that. In French œ does happen and they indeed are stuck together like that there. In Dutch when handwriting you just write an o followed by an e as you always would, while in French you really learn a different symbol when handwriting it and I wouldn't be surprised there are French words with an o followed by an e without using œ [edit, found one: moelle].
- mvdwoord 3y agoDutchie here, it is (I believe) a separate letter in the Dutch alphabet in some situations, and in some cases is sorted accordingly after X and before Z. In Dutch crossword puzzles for example the IJ takes up a single square but others such as OE or UI are not. https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/ij-plaats-in-alfabet https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/ij-plaats-in-alfabet
- psychoslave 3y agoNot saying specifically for the case of this codepoint in Unicode, but an often correct answer to this is "backward compatibility". Unicode integrate a large amount of wild characters that are there so you can consult this old document with handmade charset made in the 80s or even before.
- kryptiskt 3y agoYou capitalize both of them if a name starts with ij, like IJsselmeer. So treating ij as two separate letters would require a weird casing exception.
- Aardwolf 3y agoInteresting, seems to be true in the Netherlands but only sometimes in Flanders