LANGUAGE learners must resign themselves to making very public, very silly mistakes sooner or later. It’s an occupational hazard. Regular readers will remember that I’ve begun dipping my feet in Dutch. After a few weeks, I can now get my most basic wants and needs across with little trouble. I’m only just starting, but I’m not exactly helpless anymore.

Imagine my frustration, then, when nobody understood me when I tried to speak about the lake in Amsterdam (IJ), the large artificial lake north of Amsterdam (IJsselmeer), or a local road in The Hague (IJsclubsweg). I even got blank stares when I mentioned the neighbourhood ice cream shop (IJssalon). Now, my pronunciation is far from perfect, but it’s usually workable. Unfortunately, I had been pronouncing the first two letters in each, IJ, as initials: I-J, or (roughly) “ee-yay” in Dutch. Apparently that’s as incomprehensible as referring to this newspaper as The E-C-onomist. IJ is, it turns out, a digraph in Dutch. That means it’s used together to represent one sound, pronounced (roughly) “ay”. It’s a fixed digraph, so when it appears at the beginning of a word, both I and J are capitalised together. In contrast, we might write of the Ij, the Ijsselmeer or…Continue reading

via Johnson http://www.economist.com/node/21579195?fsrc=rss