The Dutch 'letter' IJ (2001)

Some thoughts from a Flem:<p>I was taught that the letter y is called &quot;ypsilon&quot; (pronounced &quot;ipsilon&quot;) and met a fair few people who call it &quot;ygrec&quot;. It seems like people here used to call it &quot;Griekse ij&quot; but that nomenclature fell out of favour.<p>The combinations &quot;ei&quot; and &quot;ij&quot; make the same sound, and we tend to call them respectively &quot;korte (short) ei&quot; and &quot;lange (long) ij&quot;, though there is no difference in pronunciation between, for example, &quot;leiden&quot; (to lead) and &quot;lijden&quot; (to suffer).<p>I personally wouldn&#x27;t consider &quot;ij&quot; to be a single letter any more than I would consider &quot;ei&quot;, &quot;eu&quot;, or &quot;ui&quot; 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 &quot;ij&quot; (and only &quot;ij&quot;) in a single square.

I think this is a bit of a generational thing, with older people considering ij a letter, and younger don&#x27;t, &quot;younger&quot; being under 40&#x2F;50 or so. I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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 &#x27;ij&#x27; 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 &#x27;ij&#x27; 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 &quot;IntelliJ&quot;, merging iJ? [1]<p>They embeded it in their own font in an interesting way: the ligature only works for whole &quot;Intelli&quot; + &quot;J&quot;, not just any &quot;i&quot; + &quot;j&quot;.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;ru-ru&#x2F;idea&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;ru-ru&#x2F;idea&#x2F;</a>

Hungarian has &quot;dzs&quot;, a three-symbol letter, and lots of two-symbol letters, if you want a more extreme example.

Was this official on documents? For example did ID cards in the Netherlands (and Belgium) used to have &quot;ij&quot; shown as a ligature? And now they don&#x27;t anymore?