How much does IJSVRIJ score in a Dutch game of Scrabble?

As every Scrabble player knows, playing all seven of your letters in a single turn wins you a fifty-point bonus - but before you can play a seven-letter word, you need to figure out what a letter actually is, and in some parts of the world, that's a more complicated question than you might think.

[DragoniteSpam]

I feel like every CS channel inevitably takes a sideways turn into linguistics whenever they spend a certain critical amount of time on string handling, and I'm 100% here for it.

[geekrichieuk]

Im here, trying to find sudoku man to help me sleep and random guy starts teaching me dutch referring to scrabble and unicode. Random guy has a great presentation. Random guy just earned a subscriber - go you!

[FlashheadX]

5:30 Actually, even in Flemish IJ will both be capitalized, even though they are considered 2 separate letters

[mischa]

I'm dutch, and I think this is not a single letter. It's not a separate letter in our alphabet, so it doesn't count. Yes, if it's at the start of a word, both letters need capitalization. But that doesn't apply to the other common dutch digraphs like 'ei' (which is called 'short ij' and pronounced the same as ij), 'eu', 'ui', 'oe', 'au', or 'ou'. So really there's no rhyme or reason to it. Oh btw your pronunciation is spot on, bravo!

[EdwinMartin]

Fun facts: - In the Netherlands, children learn the alphabet as ...w x ij z.- Adults still pronounce it that way - In Dutch phonebooks, the IJ is next to the Y - They call the y the "Greek ij" - They never use the Unicode version, but always write i and j.

[WitherBossEntity]

You are absolutely correct that letters are interesting. Fun (or not so fun if you have to work with it) fact: JavaScript strings don't have to be valid Unicode – they can contain unpaired surrogates. And the reason that it allows surrogates in the first place is that when JS was created, Utf-8, the only correct character encoding, was very new, so UCS-2 was the default choice, and got replaced with the essentially backwards-compatible Utf-16. Internally V8 and Spidermonkey actually use a 1-byte encoding for strings where possible. The same thing – from the timeframe to the implementation in HotSpot – also happened with Java.

[MeriaDuck]

About Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog, during some of the covid lockdowns, travel between Belgium and the Netherlands was actually restricted and that gave some interesting situations there. That's when people realized were those bloody borders actually were. There's a similar situation across the German border, where a street on one side is named in Dutch (Kerkstraat) and the other in German (Kirchstrasse)

[samswift-glasman]

One of my mates moved to Amsterdam and on visits one of our favourite things to do was to try to play scrabble in English with the Dutch set and then also to try to play Dutch trivial pursuit

[bujin]

Ah, digraphs. That's where most English people trip up when they come to Wales! 😆😆 We have many which are written as two separate letters via a keyboard, are actually two standard English letters but which correspond to a single Welsh letter. Unlike the Dutch with their "IJ", though, we don't capitalise both letters. "Dd" is one example, which corresponds to the English "Th" (as in "the" or "that" - we also have "Th", and that one is always pronounced as in "think" or "thing"). We also have "Ff" which is like the English "F" (a single "F" in Welsh is pronounced as "V"). There's "Rh" and "Ph" which are like "R" and "P", but with a little bit more of a breath to emphasise the letter, and the "R" is always rolled - another thing that is fun for English people to try as there's no real equivalent. There's "Ch", which is like the "ch" at the end of "Loch" (the Scottish lake). And, of course, everyone's favourite "Ll", which is incredibly hard to explain in text but we have so much fun listening to people trying to pronounce it.

[Wolfeur]

One of the uses for the ligature character is also to get both glyphs side-to-side in vertical texts.

[chaosflaws]

To be fair, the border around Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau is not representative of the boundary line in general, which is pretty well-behaved.

[Phyzzius]

To make matters worse, the letter 'Y' is sometimes called 'IJ' in Dutch and used as such in puzzles. If I recall correctly the official rules specifically state that this is *not* valid in Scrabble.

[janberentsen]

'ij' (in most Dutch accents) is pronounced almost exactly like the English 'I', but without that little j-ish sound at the end (in most English accents).

Also, I'm Dutch, and I and most people I know always treat it as just another combination of two letters, of which there are also many others. If I see them written together like in a puzzle, it looks more like some old leftover, than like actual, modern Dutch. My guess as to why they are (or as nowadays is more often the case, were) sometimes written together is that the I and the J are right next to each other in the alphabet, and some people got it confused a long while ago. In Dutch there are many combinations of two vowels which make slightly different sounds: 'eu', 'ui', 'au', 'ei' (which actually makes the exact same sound as 'ij'), and 'ij', just to name a few. Maybe because of their alphabetical closeness, someone got confused by that specific combination, and that confusion spread. But that's just my personal hunch.

[logiciananimal]

I remember seeing a book titled _Aegypt_ as a child, where the "Ae" was a diagraph, all capitalized. I found that wrong, though since the book was in English I guess there is a confounding possible error. As for Scrabble, I once played (in Canada, where I am from) what was called by the kids I was with "Canadian Scrabble" where the French tiles and the English tiles are mixed and you play with both at once, scoring the title as depicted - so Q becomes pretty weak if you draw a French one, but W becomes important. One is allowed to use English tiles in French words, and conversely, of course, and the game stops when half the tiles are played (instead of all - the board gets too cluttered otherwise). It makes for some weird strategy, that's for sure.

[gubigm]

Have you ever heard of a funny language like Hungarian? We have 42 letters in the alphabet, yet still using Latin characters (with some funny accents...).
So we have letters, like: cs, dz, dzs, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs. Yes, those are separate letters in the alphabet.

[Huntracony]

I think 'ij' as a separate character is being killed by the standard Dutch keyboard layout. It does not have a separate 'ij', which means most people who grew up typing on keyboards will see it as two characters. There are typewriters with a separate 'ij', I guess because those are generally monospaced? idk.

[Stoney_Eagle]

Your thumbnail confused me a bit, why am I reading Dutch on one of your videos... Am I seeing this right 😂
It can also mean ice free or without ice.

[stevenjlovelace]

What if you used "ÿ" instead?

[sauliustb]

you pronounce ijsvrij pretty well, but ij as a letter(digraph) just doesn't sound right...

[iljitsch]

The "ijsvrij" pronunciation isn't bad, but not exactly perfect... The trouble is that if you didn't grow up hearing certain sounds it's really hard to pick up the subtleties later. Like the difference between "bat" and "bet" for us Dutch people.

I first saw a computer when I was twelve, and as such learned how to write in the analog days. What they taught us was an ij that looks like a ü but with the descender from a g. And we'd write the y the same way except without the ¨. (Although y doesn't exist in Dutch, we only see it in loanwords.) Even in block letters you'd write ij like that.

But then I asked myself: how was this in print in the pre-computer days? And all the books I checked all the way back to 1952 use the separated i and j form.

Note that the ij and IJ ligatures are only in Unicode for backward compatibility and their use is not recommended. Also, many fonts don't implement them, and in all fonts I checked that weren't fixed space just i and j looks identical to the ligature character. I.e., ij and ij. Font kerning is now such that the j descender goes under the i so the two letters are sufficiently close to look normal, without even having them be a ligature in the font.

However, in fixed space fonts i j looks bad and that's probably why typewriters used to have a separate ij key.