Re:I spent way too much effort to win a game show on Dutch n...
by mcv on Monday December 16, 2019 @09:13AM
(#21803080)
Some people are really inconsistent about this, insisting it's a single letter, despite it not having a place in the alphabet. Some do try to give it a place in the alphabet in place of the 'y', or before or after it but still insisting there's only 26 letters in the alphabet.
It's really a digraph, a phoneme made out of two characters. But it's an inconsistent digraph in that both characters are capitalised together, whereas with other digraphs, only the first is capitalised.
It's not entirely true that 'y' is only used in foreign words. It's used in import words that have been part of the Dutch language for a very long time now. 'Royaal' and 'symbool' are not spelled like that in any neighbouring language, so they've been thoroughly Dutchified over the centuries. They're not foreign anymore.
It's really a digraph, a phoneme made out of two characters. But it's an inconsistent digraph in that both characters are capitalised together, whereas with other digraphs, only the first is capitalised.
It's not entirely true that 'y' is only used in foreign words. It's used in import words that have been part of the Dutch language for a very long time now. 'Royaal' and 'symbool' are not spelled like that in any neighbouring language, so they've been thoroughly Dutchified over the centuries. They're not foreign anymore.