The letter Y and the letter IJ in Dutch

Kinderdijk is Children Dike, where the windmills are.

Long ago the letter IJ  used to be the 25th letter of our Dutch alphabet, but it had to make place for the foreign Y which we call i-grec ( pronounced as ee-grec) and the IJ or ij had to be listed onder I or i. However we have so many names beginning with IJ or ij that  we cannot ignore this letter and have to treat it as one letter.
Foreigners always ask me why are these letters written with two capital letters at the beginning of a name. I say then:"because they cannot be separated, they represent one sound. IJmuiden, IJssel, IJlst...We use this letter ij frequently and in scrabble we are not allowed to use aY or y instead. . So I hope everybody understands that we have more words starting with IJ than with Y in Dutch.It's pronounced like "ei"in leisure not like "e"in let. In Dutch dialects it's pronounced as "ee" like in we. Did I answer your question? ;)
In winter we skate on "ijs"( ice) on the river IJssel.  The English word idle is almost the same in Dutch but spelled like "ijdel". More words with a similar meaning:
like= gelijk
dike= dijk
dyke= dijk
pipe= pijp
The Y however is substituted by "J" in Dutch at the beginning of a word, but has the same pronunciation as "y"in yes, you, year, yoghurt, yen, etc..

In our dictionaries  we have only 14 words starting with Y. So it's not fair not to mention the IJ or ij.

If you take part in this game, please use the letter Y or IJ in a photo, or in a poem, a story...whatever, and refer to the founder of this meme:Mrs. Denise Nesbitt and Roger who took over from her.Or show the logo of this meme in your post, or (like I do) in the sidebar.

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