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Re: Island

From:Irina Rempt <ira@...>
Date:Monday, May 15, 2000, 22:13
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 -- Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay. irina@valdyas.org (myself) - http://valdyas.conlang.org (Valdyas) http://www.valdyas.org/irina/index.html (home)