4 ms·

I'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 alfab

I'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 ago
My 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 ago
  I know several Yvonne's and we'd all pronounce it Ee-vonna.
- gpvos 2y ago
  That's strange. Standard Dutch pronunciation of that name, transliterated back to English spelling, would be Ee-vonna.
saghm 2y ago
One 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...
- moi2388 2y ago
  Yes, you are correct. It’s updated in something called “The green book”, new versions got published in 1954 - 1995 - 2005 - 2015. So for the people having learnt the language before 1995 (like myself), had the rules change 2.5 times (the last one was a minor actualisation). Which means that most of the intuitions you developed are wrong, and people spelling words differently depending on their age. This was quite confusing for me as a kid haha
- prerok 2y ago
  Well, I think the difference is that for Dutch, people are mostly colocated, i.e. share the same space and have a national curriculum to guide the use. For English, it's quite different because many countries list it as their official language but may have diverged spellings and meanings and there is no single body to direct the curriculum. The most notable is the US vs. British English and the u in colo(u)r is a mere spelling example. Consider surgery or elevator, which are bigger discrepancies. I remember from my school days, as a non-native speaker, these were much more troublesome and we had a special test just to check we could tell which is which in US and GB English.
  - daniel-s 2y ago
    I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy. English has no "boss" in charge of how the language works and who decides what the correct anything for the language is. The closest are style guides, but they come from multiple organisations and each often different to each other. So, it's harder to just decide that something will be spelt differently.
    - prerok 2y ago
      Indeed, that was what I was trying to say, but you put it more accurately. Thanks!
    - kmeisthax 2y ago
      A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. English had multiple attempted spelling reforms, but that mostly resulted in differences between American and British spellings of the same words. There was no central power to enforce a single English spelling because America had successfully broken off from the British Empire whose coercive force backed the English language. In contrast, France was extremely good at putting down revolutionaries in their colonies. Even when they gained nominal independence France would invent debts to impoverish their former colonies. France was also extremely good at putting down local languages, even within France itself. France waged a century-long campaign to hunt its own minority languages to extinction[0] and the language regulators are themselves part of the same infrastructure. In other words, "regular spelling" is a colonial atrocity and English's incomprehensible spelling rules are a demonstration of freedom. This can even be demonstrated in each language's attitude towards loanwords. English stole huge swaths of Latin, Greek, and French vocabulary. Text even a few centuries old is difficult to read and anything older than Shakespeare is completely inscrutable[1] as there's too many Germanic root words for this ostensibly Germanic language. Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped. Well, I suppose there is one reason why you'd want to stop it: loanwords make it far harder to regularize spelling. Think about, say, all the Japanese loanwords in English. Hepburn romanization[2] tried to make them readable to English speakers, but didn't do a great job, so now English has to accommodate spellings like karaoke, tsundere, or sakura alongside spellings like pleonasm, beef, or Olympic. Good luck inventing a spelling system that can both faithfully represent the "correct" sounds for all of those words, while also remaining legible to present English readers, and being adopted in every country that speaks English to some degree - off the top of my head that includes America, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, and South Africa. [0] Which I suspect may have also inspired analogous atrocities in Canada against indigenous Canadians [1] As I put it to a native Japanese speaker: "You can read Genji, I can't read Beowolf." [2] Which itself isn't used by native speakers since you can't round-trip Hepburn to Romaji. Japan itself uses Kunrei-shiki romanization, it's the one that spells つ as tu instead of tsu.

martyvis 2y ago

My 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 ago
I know several Yvonne's and we'd all pronounce it Ee-vonna.
gpvos 2y ago
That's strange. Standard Dutch pronunciation of that name, transliterated back to English spelling, would be Ee-vonna.

saghm 2y ago

One 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...

moi2388 2y ago
Yes, you are correct. It’s updated in something called “The green book”, new versions got published in 1954 - 1995 - 2005 - 2015. So for the people having learnt the language before 1995 (like myself), had the rules change 2.5 times (the last one was a minor actualisation). Which means that most of the intuitions you developed are wrong, and people spelling words differently depending on their age. This was quite confusing for me as a kid haha
prerok 2y ago
Well, I think the difference is that for Dutch, people are mostly colocated, i.e. share the same space and have a national curriculum to guide the use. For English, it's quite different because many countries list it as their official language but may have diverged spellings and meanings and there is no single body to direct the curriculum. The most notable is the US vs. British English and the u in colo(u)r is a mere spelling example. Consider surgery or elevator, which are bigger discrepancies. I remember from my school days, as a non-native speaker, these were much more troublesome and we had a special test just to check we could tell which is which in US and GB English.
- daniel-s 2y ago
  I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy. English has no "boss" in charge of how the language works and who decides what the correct anything for the language is. The closest are style guides, but they come from multiple organisations and each often different to each other. So, it's harder to just decide that something will be spelt differently.
  - prerok 2y ago
    Indeed, that was what I was trying to say, but you put it more accurately. Thanks!
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. English had multiple attempted spelling reforms, but that mostly resulted in differences between American and British spellings of the same words. There was no central power to enforce a single English spelling because America had successfully broken off from the British Empire whose coercive force backed the English language. In contrast, France was extremely good at putting down revolutionaries in their colonies. Even when they gained nominal independence France would invent debts to impoverish their former colonies. France was also extremely good at putting down local languages, even within France itself. France waged a century-long campaign to hunt its own minority languages to extinction[0] and the language regulators are themselves part of the same infrastructure. In other words, "regular spelling" is a colonial atrocity and English's incomprehensible spelling rules are a demonstration of freedom. This can even be demonstrated in each language's attitude towards loanwords. English stole huge swaths of Latin, Greek, and French vocabulary. Text even a few centuries old is difficult to read and anything older than Shakespeare is completely inscrutable[1] as there's too many Germanic root words for this ostensibly Germanic language. Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped. Well, I suppose there is one reason why you'd want to stop it: loanwords make it far harder to regularize spelling. Think about, say, all the Japanese loanwords in English. Hepburn romanization[2] tried to make them readable to English speakers, but didn't do a great job, so now English has to accommodate spellings like karaoke, tsundere, or sakura alongside spellings like pleonasm, beef, or Olympic. Good luck inventing a spelling system that can both faithfully represent the "correct" sounds for all of those words, while also remaining legible to present English readers, and being adopted in every country that speaks English to some degree - off the top of my head that includes America, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, and South Africa. [0] Which I suspect may have also inspired analogous atrocities in Canada against indigenous Canadians [1] As I put it to a native Japanese speaker: "You can read Genji, I can't read Beowolf." [2] Which itself isn't used by native speakers since you can't round-trip Hepburn to Romaji. Japan itself uses Kunrei-shiki romanization, it's the one that spells つ as tu instead of tsu.