Re: "Kerning?" (fwd)

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from "..."  Thu, 20 Feb 1997 16:37:16 -0500 (EST) 
>  
> Forwarded message: 
> From: DickWeltz@xxxxxxxx 
> Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 15:41:27 -0500 (EST) 
>  
> ===================================================================== 
>  
> Sorry, but I've been through this too many times. IJ regardless of case is, 
> indeed, an indivisible character combination in Dutch, and is treated as a 
> single letter -- sometimes kerned to where the uninitiated may "think" what 
> they are seeing is Y with a dieresis.... The 
> y-dieresis may be categorized with the tooth fairy and easter bunny eggs. 
 
I've don't doubt that he's right, as far as modern language goes. But 
I infer that Mr. Weltz is not steeped in Dutch language. Neither am I, for
that matter; but I've translated a good bit of it, and read a lot (all
16th-19th). And until very recently (until there was an official arbiter like
Dick Weltz), people spelled things as best they could; and I imagine that
there was quite a gap between literati and compositors, too. I have been speaking
from the start about history and etymology and old Dutch scholarly traditions,
where I feel on firmer ground. As I write, the _Lijst van de Voornaamste
Aardrijkskundige Namen in den N-I Archipel_ (Weltevreden: Landsdrukkerij, 1913)
lies open to the Index p.343. There, sandwiched between w entries and z entries,
are a bunch of "ij" and y(diaeresis) entries, all jumbled together! Dig it:
ij alphabetized as y (_very_ common). In a government publication, no less. 
 
This morning I received a msg from a frequent contributor to this list, who 
wrote: 
> "All along I thought that I was 
> the only person reading the XyWrite list who had any knowledge of the obscure 
> Dutch language. You are of course right about the ij/y(diaeresis) evidence from 
> the nineteenth century. In my own work, I have been reading a fair amount of 
> fourteenth and fifteenth century Dutch for a book I am writing on land 
> drainage and its management in late-medieval Holland. In some of the 
> archival pieces I have read, I've encountered some variations of ij, 
> such as eij and ey in words rendered as mij or wij today." 
 
The reason I used the example of "ice" is that it seems so incontrovertible.
Perhaps I didn't go into it enough to Anniehilate entirely this thread (so
helpfully & graciously fomented by her, with her nose for what *might* be
a fatal flaw). If you start at the start, namely Indo-European, ice is "ieg". 
We know from its offspring (e.g. Icelandic "jokiell", snow mountain) 
that ieg was a diphthong, probably pronounced ee-aye'gh (rhymes with free keg).
A cognate is "igloo" (actually, I see that my dictionary says that's an Inuit
word, but I'd wager they got it from the Danes in Greenland or somebody north).
Old Hollanders pronounced "ijs" as a diphthong, something like "eye-aye-ss"
(whereas today it's just "ice"). The letter Y is not normally a diphthong; but
when it was, as in the old pronunciation of ijs, they sometimes used y(diaeresis)
to indicate it. I've seen it often in old books. The river Yser is a precise,
linguistically consistent extenuation of this, the Icy River. So is Ice
Maiden Ysolde.

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Robert Holmgren 
holmgren@xxxxxxxx 
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