Some thoughts from a Flem:<p>I was taught that the letter y is called "ypsilon" (pronounced "ipsilon") and met a fair few people who call it "ygrec". It seems like people here used to call it "Griekse ij" but that nomenclature fell out of favour.<p>The combinations "ei" and "ij" make the same sound, and we tend to call them respectively "korte (short) ei" and "lange (long) ij", though there is no difference in pronunciation between, for example, "leiden" (to lead) and "lijden" (to suffer).<p>I personally wouldn't consider "ij" to be a single letter any more than I would consider "ei", "eu", or "ui" to be a single letter. Though unlike the author I would prefer spacing out the letters individually as:<p><pre><code> r e i s t i j d
</code></pre>
rather than:<p><pre><code> r ei s t ij d
</code></pre>
even though I have noticed crossword puzzles tend to put "ij" (and only "ij") in a single square.
I think this is a bit of a generational thing, with older people considering ij a letter, and younger don't, "younger" being under 40/50 or so. I'm approaching 40 and I was never taught to see ij as a letter, and always considered it to be the same as eu, ou, ei, and so forth: two letters that make a single sound (digraph).<p>The y doesn't occur in Dutch words, only in loanwords, and while loanwords with a y are relatively common now, I suppose most are also fairly new (as in: last 100 years or so), which would explain the generational difference.<p>I also think it's fine to just capitalize the I: Ijsland instead of IJsland. I suspect this will be the norm 50 years from now.
I think the ligature has just disappeared in favor of 'ij' because in Holland we use American keyboards. There used to be a special Dutch keyboard layout but simply using the American ones was cheaper. They lack the accents, the old florin sign and ligatures we have like the 'ij' and the paragraph sign. So we ended up using those less and less. Now I never write accents anymore in Dutch. And good riddance.
I mean in English “th” ceally should be it’s own letter. It really has nothing to do with a “t” or an “h” and really should thought of as a single letter that just looks like two others. In many fonts, it really is because it’s a common ligature for aesthetic reasons.
Curious, is this what inspired JetBrains to include such ligature in writing "IntelliJ", merging iJ? [1]<p>They embeded it in their own font in an interesting way: the ligature only works for whole "Intelli" + "J", not just any "i" + "j".<p>[1] <a href="https://www.jetbrains.com/ru-ru/idea/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.jetbrains.com/ru-ru/idea/</a>
Was this official on documents? For example did ID cards in the Netherlands (and Belgium) used to have "ij" shown as a ligature? And now they don't anymore?