Re: Island

On Mon, 15 May 2000, Roger Mills wrote:

> I've been waiting for that too.  As a non-native reader of Dutch, I
> can add: eiland. IIRC, there's also a place name 'Het Ei' which I
> somehow doubt means 'The Egg'.
I've taken the liberty to fix your quote marks, because they came
through as gibberish.

I think you mean "Het IJ", which is the river-arm that Amsterdam is
built on. It's pronounced the same way that "Het Ei" would be, but
that's a relatively modern development; until the middle of the
seventeenth century, "ij" used to be pronounced /i:/. The 'j' is just
a lengthened form of 'i', so it really was a double 'i' to indicate
length.

It means, of course, "The Water".

   Irina

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