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

Irina 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.
Is this happening to the diphthong 'ei' as well? If I'm not mistaken, they
should sound the same (generating interesting couplets as rijst/reist =
rice/he goes which are different only in the written form). This would mean
that Dutch is going to sound quite German... interesting, even if I
personally prefer the sound of Dutch to that of German.

Luca

> 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.
>
>    Irina
>
> --
>            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay.
> irina@valdyas.org (myself)     http://www.valdyas.org/irina/valdyas
>