Talk:IJsselmeer

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[edit] Diphthong Digraph Capitalization

From the (current version of the) article:

The internal capitalisation in the spelling is caused by the
fact that IJ is a diphthong in Dutch, the two letters producing
a single vowel sound when pronounced.

Although I don't know Dutch, this seems like at best a very incomplete explanation, and at worst plain wrong. In other languages (e.g., English, Greek, Latin, ...), a capitalized word can begin with a diphthong, but nonetheless only the first letter is capitalized. If the Dutch language ordinarily capitalizes both letters of a diphthong in such cases, that would be an interesting peculiarity of the language, and something that ought to show up in the article on the language, but it's not mentioned there as far as I can tell. There are discussions on diphthongs in both the Dutch language article and the one on Dutch phonology, but there is nothing in either about capitalization, as near as I can determine, nor can I find anything about this matter in the article on Dutch orthography. This would seem a curious omission in an English-language article on the subject, if indeed diphthongs are capitalized atomically in Dutch, since that would be a very notable orthographic difference from English. Is the IJ actually a ligature, as Bz2 seems to be saying (though his statement is anything but clear)? If so, that would explain the capitalization (and the wording in the article should be changed to read ligature rather than diphthong), but in that case also I'd expect to see a single Unicode character rather than the two letters I and J. Can someone who actually knows Dutch clarify this issue, and explain the real reason for the double capitalization of IJsselmeer? --Jonadab

Answering my own question, the article also links to IJ (letter), which explains that the IJ is a digraph and in Dutch often considered to be a single letter. I will adjust the wording of the IJsselmeer article to clarify this.