I think most Dutch people nowadays think of that as two letters: i-j. It's called a "long ij", as a counterpart to the "short ei" (same pronunciation), which definitely is considered two letters.

The only place where the difference between 1 letter and 2 letters still is visible is in names that start with a long ij, because of the capitalization. E.g. the name of the city IJmuiden is written like that and not as Ijmuiden.

In handwriting it's written as one character, but I think that's just a ligature: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraaf)#/media/Bestand:IJ...

Yes, it's changing. Fortunately 'my' branch of the family picked 'ij' so we're in the clear ;) But for some of the older members it is causing all kinds of trouble, especially when interacting with the authorities, more so if one set of documents uses 'ij' and another through accidents of history uses 'y'. Some schools even teach 'ij' as the 25th letter of our alphabet, when they really should be using 'y' for that spot and 'ij' as a two letter combination.

Also, when spelling words people use 'ij' as a single letter for instance a Dutch person would spell 'mijn' as 'm', 'ij', 'n' (and they would likely not say 'lange ij' because there is no word 'mein' in Dutch.

It also causes no end of trouble with storing and searching because a Dutch person might expect IJ to be sorted after 'X' but instead it appears sorted as the combination I J . The fact that different reference works use different methods doesn't help either.

> for instance a Dutch person would spell 'mijn' as 'm', 'ij', 'n'

Not anyone under the age of fifty, unless they want to deal with the follow up question too. ("Is that a long or short ij/ei?")

Here's a screenshot from just one random Dutch children's spelling quiz online:

https://postimg.cc/47wFHy0v

Separate letters for 'ij', despite it formally being a single letter.

In Italy, in Veneto (the region around Venice) the local dialect tends to omit the last letter of a word if such letter is a vowel.

Because of that, my grand father and his sister happened to have different family name in their ID cards: when they got registered by the priest at the beginning of 1900, on a paper book of course, the priest who registered the sister added an "I" at the end of the family name as he thought that that should be the right spelling in proper Italian. At that time ID cards did not even exist so nobody bothered.

In Greece there are different male/female variants of the same surname, so it would be normal for a married couple to have slightly different surnames.

e.g Papadopoulou vs Papadopoulos.

Then there are the cases where a Greek wife takes the male surname form to co-exist more easily in other countries where it is expected for a husband/wife surname to match (or if different, be more considerably different).

Ahhh interesting, I didn't know it was an entirely separate, single letter! I was in Amsterdam a few weeks back and saw a lot of signage featuring "ij" had it stylised with the "i" sitting just above the tail of the "j" but never considered that it was just one letter.

Czech has this too, sort of, where "ch" is considered one letter but it is composed of two separate characters.

Croatian has a few of these as well like NJ and LJ

Here is the full alphabet

A B C Č Ć D Dž Đ E F G H I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S Š T U V Z Ž

Handwritten, it looks like y with diaresis.

I've also noticed over a few recent trips to Amsterdam that there's something special about the sound Ij. The river IJ, and the beer Ijwit.

The language is unfamiliar to me, and quite intriguing. I find the pronunciation of Zuid very counter-intuitive.

Ahhh yeah the beer with the ostrich logo :D I have a real soft spot for it.

To be fair, digitally, IJ is simply spelled using the separate letters I and J in Dutch, despite it being a digraph. That codepoint you used is deprecated in Unicode and only there for historic compatibility reasons. Your family members using 'ij' are simply applying the correct orthography, with those using 'y' just digging themselves into a hole.

I don't know what the correct codepoint is but it certainly isn't deprecated in the language and that's the bit that counts, historic compatibility wasn't part of ASCII and that's what caused this. 'ij' takes the same spot as the Greek letter 'y' in the Dutch alphabet and that's what stops this from being resolved to everybody's satisfaction. "Those using 'y'" -> people who didn't have a choice in the matter because the official that made the change did so without their consent in a couple of cases and once it is on your birth certificate good luck trying to change it retroactively across all of your documentation.

More than you ever wanted to know about 'IJ':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)

I still have a typewriter that has it as a single letter.

You are confusing letter with codepoint and glyph. The IJ is one letter, which consists of two glyphs, and in the Unicode implementation two codepoints. This isn't some historic oversight in Unicode, it was implemented like this based on the Dutch orthography.

Yes, this can lead to bugs in software, but so can anything related to names.

It is deprecated in Dutch to use a single codepoint for the IJ. That was never really an option in any of the character encodings in popular use.

The fact that it is one letter is relevant in cases like (vertical) lettering (which most designers nowadays fuck up), in typography (the number of fonts which make ij look awkward and unaligned is huge), and in collation and sorting using a Dutch locale. I will defend its proper use and treatment where possible, but representing it as a single codepoint is not a sensible goal, and never was.

> The IJ is one letter

I do not believe this to be correct. Wikipedia says it's a digraph of two letters. It does say that the codepoint is deprecated, but it's only defined as "compat", not as deprecated in the unicode data.

It is (sometimes) one letter culturally speaking and in lettering. A Dutch alphabet as taught to children used to end in 'X IJ Z' instead of 'X Y Z', although this is no longer the case ever since people started eating 'yoghurt' in the twentieth century. In capitalisation of words too it is treated as a single 'letter' (e.g., 'IJsselmeer' for the lake; note the uppercase 'J').

If you dig deeper on the Unicode website you'll find that the reason those codepoints are included is compatibility with 'certain very rare legacy (non-Unicode) character encodings'. They are not 'deprecated' as compatibility characters for those old legacy encodings, but 'deprecated' as suitable for rendering Dutch text unencumbered by those early code pages.

Words have meanings. "deprecated" has a very specific meaning in Unicode and it does not apply to this code point. A lot of characters we use on a daily are marked <compat>.

This is not a codepoint in daily use. It never was outside of those few legacy encodings. If it is not deprecated, it is not so because it never was in common use in the first place. The concept of the ij/IJ as a single codepoint is deprecated, regardless of the technical classification in Unicode.

If you are claiming that 0x0132 is a codepoint in common use or required for correctly spelled Dutch, you are mistaken.

> If you are claiming that 0x0132 is a codepoint in common use or required for correctly spelled Dutch, you are mistaken.

I made no comment in support or opposition of that. I cannot talk to that as I’m not familiar with either Dutch or that letter. However there are many compat characters in Unicode and there are incredibly few deprecated ones so I was addressing the deprecation claim (and what I believe is a misuse of the term letter). You’re interpreting things into my replies that just aren’t there.

Compat characters are very useful and even if they are not stored all the time, they often show up in text processing in memory for better glyph selection.

That would be http://www.unicode-symbol.com/u/0133.html (ij), am I right?

Yes, that's the one. According to the Wikipedia page it is deprecated but that doesn't show in the page linked here.

It is mentioned here:

https://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html#6a

> The Unicode Standard encodes these two compatibility characters [0x0132 IJ and 0x0133 ij] to provide support for roundtrip conversion of the Dutch letter 'ij' in certain very rare legacy (non-Unicode) character encodings. It is strongly preferred (and far more common) to use the two character ASCII sequence 'ij' to represent this letter instead.

You can dig in the Unicode mailing lists for discussions on this from over twenty years ago. The bottom line is that you shouldn't use 0x0132 and 0x0133 in modern text. By now this is a resolved issue.

I'm not sure this issue can ever satisfactorily be resolved by ignoring it. Yes, it is customary even among Dutchies to just type i-j because it's easier, but the Dutch alphabet does have a dotted ij as its 25th letter. It's not a ligature in the source language, it is a single letter; as evidenced by the fact that the proper noun IJsselmeer (among others) is written with two capital letters (if not using the single 0x0132 IJ). The letter y does not exist in the Dutch script, only in loanwords (of which we have plenty).

Stop repeating that nonsense! The current Dutch alphabet has 'Y' as its 25th letter. Not 'IJ'. This is a historical thing.

The 'IJ' is a letter, culturally speaking, in the sense that it is capitalized as one, and that it is often rendered as a single unit (which you can see in vertical lettering, if done right), and sorted as if it was a single letter. In terms of character encoding however, it is a 'i' followed by a 'j'.

Cf.:

* https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/ij-plaats-in-alfabet (first sentence!)

* https://taaladvies.net/ij-alfabetisering/

See my other posts for 0x0132, which is a compatibility character for rare obsolete character encodings which did encode it on a single codepoint.

I corrected the Wikipedia article now. That code point is not deprecated, it's a compatibility character which is a different thing entirely.

Ha, yes, I have an 'eij' in my last name and constantly explaining it's both the short ei and the long ij is maddening. In reality of course, it's just an e followed by an 'ij' but yeah no never mind.