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.
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).
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:
r e i s t i j d
r ei s t ij d
I do love these minute and local details of linguistics and history. We look at Chinese as a hard language because of the sounds influencing meaning while having (trivially!) nuanced examples as well.
Don’t get me started on Greek / Roman / Germanic heritage of words and sounds. I love this.
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.
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 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.
Nope, this just looks wrong to me and the spelling rules do not allow it. It is written as a single letter, so it should be capitalized as a single letter.
Afrikaans seems to have done fine with just giving up on this letter/sequence of letters entirely.
The interesting thing is that Afrikaans actually went the opposite direction as Dutch. Prior to 1863 Dutch used 'y' and 'ij' pretty much interchangeably, but a spelling reform made 'ij' the official spelling in Dutch. However, Afrikaans seems to have settled on 'y' and 'i', leading to things like the Dutch word 'tijd' being spelled 'tyd' in Afrikaans.
We also have this (rather popular) grammar contest on TV, called "Het Groot Dictee der Nederlandse taal", that seemed designed to only appeal to linguistic purists. With ridiculous sentences that bring orgasms to language elites. Especially the 2013 version [0] by Kees van Kooten was called a "sadistical language experiment" by De Volkskrant newspaper.
Those frequent changes and the TV show made me decide I do not care a single bit about getting the grammar/spelling correct, and I'll just invent own constructs and adopt any slang, if they are fun.
[0] https://archief.ntr.nl/grootdictee/2014/05/27/dicteetekst-20...
The placement of the tongue is exactly between those two letters. Makes perfect sense to me. No need for an extra letter just for that.
That is not the origin of the digraph "th" (and also I would suggest picking up an introductory textbook of phonetics, because you’re way off). The digraph comes from the fact that in Classical Greek the unvoiced dental stop denoted by the letter theta was pronounced with aspiration, but in Latin the native dental stop denoted by the letter T was pronounced without aspiration. Therefore, when the Romans had to represent Greek words with theta in their own alphabet, they added an H after the T to mark the aspiration.
They embeded it in their own font in an interesting way: the ligature only works for whole "Intelli" + "J", not just any "i" + "j".