Spelling it "dike" helps keep people's minds on the right thing. :)
If you spell it "dijk" it's even less racy, because it's no longer a four-letter word.
Well shit. Guess I'll have to clean out my mind with some soap...
As a Dutch person myself, capitalizing just the I and not the J hurts my eyes. Ijsselmeer or IJsselmeer?
Interesting. I never really gave it much thought, but Ij actually bothers me so much that I usually try to avoid using it at the beginning of a sentence, and I cringe when I need to capitalize because it's a place (like Ijsselmeer).
Just did some googling. Turns out that unlike the other combinations, capitalizing both letters is mandatory for 'IJ'. TIL...
We also have "ei", which sounds the same and was invented to annoy people learning Dutch. Then there's "oe", "eu", "ui". And just to fuck even more with people learning the language, we have "au" and "ou" which also sound the same. Oh, and "ch" and "g".
Hans Brinker, the inventor of the Dutch language, famously would toss a florijn to decide between using ei/ij and au/ou, as he was not fond of foreigners. He's mostly known for saving our country though when he plugged a hole in a dyke with his finger (yes, I know what you're thinking, and no, we do not appreciate your dirty minds making light of this heroic act).