Dutch Reformed ( y ) with dots over OR ij
Batch [M36G-41Y] (Entry 2) I changed. Can anyone give me a final decision on how I should index these? The original indexer entered - Van Zijl
Answers
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See this topic
where a knowledgeable Community member said "Please do not index South African names with ÿ It has become a major frustration point amongst the afrikaans genealogy community. It must be indexed ij eg: van Zijl"
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Thanks. I will do that from now on. Problem is I do not remember seeing ij's typewritten.
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Have seen a lot of conflicting opinions about this. One person said ALWAYS put in ( ij ) to replace the ( Y ). Other times I see some place names put in ( i ) only or ( y ) only [Without dots]. I need someone's final decision on this matter.
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It is my understanding that in (modern) Dutch, ij versus ÿ is essentially a typographic difference only, similar to how some fonts/scripts have a crossbar on a capital J, and some don't. However, I don't know whether these records are actually in Dutch, or Afrikaans; the latter has apparently evolved spelling rules/practices divergent from Dutch.
Failing Word From On High, I guess we fall back on the basic rule: index what you see. If it has dots, don't index it as plain 'y', and if it's clearly written as a single letter, don't index it as two letters. Of course, that's still a judgement call, because all cursive letters are conjoined to some degree....
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I am unfamiliar with the project but know that there is an icon for international letters. It is next to the the project instructions. When typing in the field information, find the character you are looking for (y with 2 dots) and click on it. It will place it in the field where your cursor is.
That way you are "typing what you see", not guessing what was intended. Hope it works for you.
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The Afrikaan genealogy community insists on replacing the y with ij. Also to Ignore marks above the u's as well, unless it has 2 dots above it. I flagged the reply {MaureenE123} sent me last December.
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The y with the umlaut (two dots) above it does not always look like a ij. It is sometimes difficult to tell.
I am going to index what I see. I am not going to replace a letter. If it looks like y, but is confusing, I index it the way one would an alias: I type what I see, and then also add the name again with the ij in place of the y.
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I see plenty on y's in the Dutch Reformed without the dots. This makes things even more confusing. I just hope the Spirit is guiding me while indexing or reviewing these.
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I am getting conflicting info from Google and Dutch South Africans about this. Many times the info with Google has just plain y's and NOT ij. Someone insisted I replace the Y with ij. Can someone help me with this conundrum?
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For example the batch [MQ9B-8CL] The man's last name is Pryra in the Google lookup. I looked up the Wife's name to confirm this. The wife's last name is misspelled too. Her handwriting confirms the Spelling with the Google lookup.
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I didn't find anything in the project-specific instructions, so I would fall back on the basic guideline: index what you see. For example, in batch MQ9B-8CL, I'd index the surname as Prijra -- although I can see arguments for reading (and therefore indexing) it as Prÿra. (Either way, Pryra is definitely wrong.)
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Pryra IS a Last Name. I looked up the Wife's name. There are plenty of them listed. There are NO Prijra's I could see.
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Got this Batch too [MQ9B-TW7] Their names as Parents. Now the (a) has two dots.
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The scribe for batch MQ9B-TW7 certainly liked his letter-bling: he writes Mariä and Daniël and Ignatiüs. (Granted, those all have some linguistic validity: the diaeresis is indicating that the second vowel is a separate syllable from the preceding one. The same cannot be said for the extra dots on Prijrä.) But it's actually an excellent example for showing that it's two letters, not a single 'y' with dots: there's a clear break between the 'i' and the 'j'.
(It's handwriting, so if the strokes were conjoined, it wouldn't really tell us anything, but the fact that they're not conjoined is thus extra revealing.)
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Here is a nice example of a writing exercise from a dutch school.
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Sometimes I see Yda as a first name. I remember seeing somewhere that if the Y has 2 dots, we should enter IJda. Having the first two letters capitalized.
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As I'm Dutch, I might give some insight in this.
As shown above in the example of a dutch writing exercise, there is a special character between x and z. This special character is historical the combination of i and j.
This character is NOT a ÿ! It simply doesn't exist in the nowadays international computerised characterlist. It even didn't exist in the dutch alphabet until the late 1800s.
In dutch this is called a "lange (long) ij", as opposite to a "korte (short) ei". You can see it at the end of my family name. In handwriting this is written as this "lange ij". On old-school typewriters and in classic printing this special character exists, on computers it unfortunately does not and therefore written as 'ij'.
What does it mean?
in handwriting there are three ways of writing this (in fact I learned all three of them at school, as kids nowadays still do). The first way is to clearly separate the i and the j (as in computers). The second way is to write them closely together (as shown in the example posted by Yulia). The third way is to use the "lange ij", where the i and the j are connected. All three of them are essentially the same.
To even more complicate it, often the dots over the i and the j aren't written at al. Or, they are written as one single dash over both letters. Or, the are written as 2 small vertical or oblique lines over the letters instead.
And sometimes even the dutch themselves nowadays use a y on computers.
No matter what, they are all the 'lange ij" and should therefore - in handwritten dutch documents - solely be indexed as ij (lowercase) or IJ (uppercase) at the beginning of a word or a name. In a Word-document one would reduce the spacing between them.
Definitely; using y or ÿ is wrong.
That said, as dutch people moved to other countries the "lange ij" often became a y in countries with english as native language. So nowadays e.g. my US relatives write our family name officially as "Ravenzwaay" oder "Ravenswaay".
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I have seen Y's with only one dot too. Of course I have assumed it was (ij). Even the ones with a dash over I have been doing that. But people use Google. I have NEVER seen Henry as Henrij. As an indexer we are to follow rules. This one in Impossible to follow with Dutch.
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You're correct, but ... Henry is not a dutch name. And yes Henrij does exists also. e.g.
Henry comes from the french occupation in the Netherlands (and later on from the english language as well) or the child was born from french speaking or french born parents. It usually stands for Hendrik, Henrij and other variations. You will find Jan as Jean or Pieter as Pierre in this particular time. Later on (as nowadays) its given to children as every other international name.
So yes, IMHO the indexing of dutch documents shouldn't really be done by persons who don't speak the dutch language natively. Or at least a secondary control should be done by a native speaker.
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As a further enhancement:
The latin script character ÿ is a rare character which only can be found in early german names and words, in some french (place) names, in some hungarian names, in Ludic (a finnic language), in the Ngiemboon language (Cameroon) and the Tlingit language (spoken by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada).
It's definitly not a character which exists in Dutch and therefore it should never be used for indexing.
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Quoth Lars: "It simply doesn't exist nowadays in the international computerised characterlist."
Well, it does and it doesn't: the Unicode chart includes both "Latin Capital Ligature IJ" (IJ) and "Latin Small Ligature IJ" (ij), but not all fonts/typefaces include a glyph for it, and even the ones that do often don't really make it look any different from just typing an 'i' followed by a 'j'. (It'll behave like a single character, but that's only noticeable if you try to select just one of its halves.) And I don't know if this glyph is included in any standard keyboard layout, for any language, meaning that using it (typing it) means either software-specific solutions, or copy-and-paste from somewhere (such as your system's character map or Wikipedia). It would appear that the Dutch consensus is that it's not worth the bother: typing ij (i followed by j) is much, much easier and looks exactly the same.
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Thank you Yulia for the info about the Unicode Chart. I didn't realise, it existed there.
But as you said, we simply type i and j. The reason for that is very simple: a keyboard in the dutch QWERTY-layout (which is based on the US International keyboard layout with some minor adaptions) doesn't have the glyph ij on it. It cannot be reached through a special key-combination either. And copy-and-paste the glyph is much, much too difficult for most users.
Ultimately y and it's handwritten variations should be indexed as ij. Only in foreign words or names (like Henry) it should not. And for the latter, you must be a native speaker to be sure.
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