Re: CHAT: YAC: or more exactly: yet another conlang sketch

Irina Rempt wrote:
>
> On Tue, 31 Oct 2000, Robert Hailman wrote:
>
> > daniel andreasson wrote:
>
> > > I like the -ij of Dutch too, though with a different pronunciation
> > > then, right Mrs. Rempt-Drijfhout? :)
> >
> > How is it pronounced in Dutch, I know it exists, and that at one type it
> > was treated as a single letter (maybe it still is), but I never knew
> > it's pronounciation.
>
> It's [Ej], but lately young people, probably following the fashion of
> TV presenters who are mostly from the west of the country, have taken
> to saying something closer to [Aj]. That sounds sloppy to me, but
> then I'm an old-fashioned middle-aged curmudgeon (or can only men be
> curmudgeons?). I try to keep my kids from succumbing, but it's a
> losing battle.
Ah. Lousy TV presenters, corrupting the Dutch youth of today. ;o)

About "curmudgeon", I don't know about it's gender associations. When I
think of a curmudgeon, I think of a man, but it could easily be extended
to women.

> I have a manual typewriter five years older than I am (from
> nineteen-fiftymumble) and it used to have an 'ij' key, squeezing both
> the 'i' and the 'j' in the same space. I had it filed off and
> replaced with a dead key doing 'hacek' and 'c@ciul@', the latter
> being the little bow above the 'a' occurring in Romanian, which
> should be instead of the shwa symbols in the word for it.
Hmm... it does seem rather useless to have a specialised key for it. I
do seem to recall the Extended ASCII specification having a symbol for
it, but that could just be me.

Also, what does "ÿ" mean? If I'm not mistaken, that's used in Dutch as
well.

Hmm, I've been wondering about both those things for quite some time,
and it never occured to ask my guitar teacher what they are. He speaks
Dutch, as does his wife.

--
Robert