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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
by gpvos 2y ago
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.
- jetrink 2y agoVery interesting. An example that users of this forum will be familiar with is Edsger Dijkstra.
- segfaltnh 2y agoDoes this mean the correct pronunciation is "deekstra"?
- wirrbel 2y agono, daykstra. In the dutch of the middle-ages it might have been deekstra
- dep_b 2y agoIt’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
- samatman 2y agoIn 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.
- BalinKing 2y agoTo 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/
- _a_a_a_ 2y ago"monophthongizes" Heck of a word is that.
- CRConrad 2y agoAn example from the WP article linked by user BalinKing: > Some dialects of English make monophthongs from former diphthongs. For instance, Southern American English tends to realize the diphthong /aɪ/ as in eye as a long monophthong [äː], a feature known as /aj/ ungliding or /ay/ ungliding. You know, where “I spy with my eye” from a (caricatured) Southerner becomes “Ah spah with mah ah”. What are diphthongs in most dialects of English have been turned into monophthongs. Thanks, BalinKing, TIL!
- BalinKing 2y agohey, I don't make the rules :-P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthongization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthongization
- tomsmeding 2y agoDutch /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.
- gpvos 2y agoThat is indeed pretty close, but not exact.
- samatman 2y agoTrue, but to my ear at least, /eɪ/ is further from /ɛi/ than /aɪ/ is. Maybe more to the point, English speakers (American ones at least) are going to "realize" the name Dijkstra with an /aɪ/ dipthong. "Dayksra" would not occur to us to say. Phonemes are a funny thing: if an American were to pronounce that last name perfectly (or a Dutch person speaking English, for that matter), other Americans would still hear /daɪkstɹə/, or at most, "/daɪkstɹə/ but it sounds a bit foreign". Some sounds which we don't produce are audibly not-English-phonemes, like German ü or Scandanavian ø, but others are not. Another example of this is that native English speakers aren't usually sensitive to the difference between the r sound in our word "pear" and the r sound in Spanish "pero", but recognize that "perro" is a different rhotic sound.
- segfaltnh 2y agoIn my region and accent (Boston area), I don't know how I would pronounce the first and third one differently. Maybe this is a Mary/Merry/Marry thing based on accent.
- mywittyname 2y agoJust guessing here, because my pronunciation is the same as yours... Dai = Day Die = Die If you make an "ay" sound, then transition to an "i" sound, you can feel that the sounds are continuous. So maybe that inbetween sound OP is talking about literally the sound you make with your tongue between "ay" and "i".
- dep_b 2y agoSorry, the second one should be more like “Deekstra”
- gpvos 2y agoIt could be in several Dutch dialects (which did not take part in the sound shift I described), but not in the standard language. See the sibling replies.
- cbluth 2y agoDon't forget the river IJ, sounds like "eye"
- stavros 2y agoIs it "eye" or "ey"? I remember "destijl" pronounced "de steyl" and not "de style".
- gpvos 2y agoIt's a sound that does not exactly exist in English, somewhere between the diphtongized a in maze and eye. Quite many dialects kept the old ee pronunciation.
- Muromec 2y agoAnd then kids in Amsterdam pronounce it now as I anyway
- euroderf 2y agoAnd the windmill-brewery in AMS, Brouwerij 't IJ.
- kbouck 2y agoThere's also an Amsterdam movie theatre across the IJ named "Eye" Film. I(expat)'ve always heard dutch "ij" as an over-annunciated "eye" where the sides of your mouth are a more widely open.
- robador 2y agoI'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
- martyvis 2y agoMy 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
- breakingcups 2y agoI know several Yvonne's and we'd all pronounce it Ee-vonna.
- gpvos 2y agoThat's strange. Standard Dutch pronunciation of that name, transliterated back to English spelling, would be Ee-vonna.
- saghm 2y agoOne 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-spelling-of-pancake/ https://dutchreview.com/news/dutch-government-argue-over-spe...
- wirrbel 2y agoA 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.
- thequux 2y agoIt'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.
- DougN7 2y ago30 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.
- monomers 2y agoThere 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.
- consp 2y agoIn 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)
- dudeinjapan 2y agoHaha I was going to make a snarky comment that xij is done to make it look more Dutch, but its actually true!
- syncsynchalt 2y agoMy favorite part of ij is the folk transliteration to the character "ÿ". In cursive script, it's easy to see how "ij" becomes "ÿ". However, "ÿ"s Unicode codepoint of U+FF means it often shows up as a placeholder for "unrecognized character", doubling down the misapprehension that "ÿ" is the correct character in dutch text.
- gpvos 2y agoMy favourite parts are (1) how you can see a capital U with a small cutout at the bottom of the left straight line used as IJ, and (2) how some foreign words are mangled by Dutch people who are not so good at spelling, like bijoux spelled as byoux, which can in turn confuse foreign visitors.
- krsdcbl 2y agothis makes so much sense - speaking German and English fluently, my brain always defaulted to interpret "ij" in dutch as "ee’" - but it took your comment to make me understand that it's indeed correct, and actually why
- gpvos 2y agoWell, it used to be correct until about 1600 or so. There are a couple of words like bijzonder where it is still pronounced as English "ee", and in the suffix -lijk it is reduced to a schwa.
- LgWoodenBadger 2y agoFor ESL folks who may be confused, the long “i” is pronounced like “my fly high rye guy try dry” etc. It is not pronounced like “bee see free glee me.”
- gpvos 2y agoI think that's what I wrote? Sorry if it wasn't clear enough.