Re: Dutch "ij"

Jan van Steenbergen wrote:
> Of course, you are right. All I wanted to say is it took two hits on the
> typewriter to produce it. But as a matter of fact, it is one letter, indeed.
> Just curious: are there other examples in the world's languages of similar
> behaviour?
Spanish "ch", "ll", and "ñ" (che, elle, eñe) are traditionally counted
as one letter each for the purposes of alphabetization, so that a
Spanish dictionaries will have sections for a, b, c, ch, d, e ... k, l,
ll, m, n, ñ ...  Thus, "chocolate" will follow "color".  However, they
don't write CHocolate or LLamo.  Also, I seem to remember reading that
the Spanish Academy (or whatever it's called) has recommended treating
them as combinations.  But, I don't know how much influence that has had
on everyday usage.  FWIW, my Spanish-English dictionary has separate ch,
ll, and ñ sections.

The Kassi syllabry does kind of the opposite, counting diacritics as
letters.  They're referred to as "child letters" or "weak letters" as
opposed to "mother letters" or "strong letters", but for the purposes of
alphabetization, one treats them as if they followed the character
rather than being part of it.

Does "ij" have a special name in Dutch?

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