Wikipedia
EIJ, Eij or eiJ may refer to:
- IJ (digraph), a digraph in the Dutch language
- Haplogroup Eij (Y-DNA)
- Congregation of the Holy Infant Jesus
- Institute for Justice, a United States non-profit libertarian public interest law firm
- Great Wall Airlines' IATA code
- Inspectioneering Journal, a chemical and refining industry trade journal focusing on mechanical integrity
- iJustine, an American YouTube personality
< PLEASE: Do not replace the IJ/ij written as two letters in this article with > < Unicode IJ (U+0132) / ij (U+0133). Though these characters obviously exist, their > < use is officially discouraged. They are mentioned in the sections "encoding" > < and "keyboards" and that should remain the only places where they are used. > < Richardw NL / 2007-10-15T0717 > < ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --> IJ (lowercase ij; ) is a digraph of the letters i and j. Occurring in the Dutch language, it is sometimes considered a ligature, or even a letter in itself – although in most fonts that have a separate character for ij the two composing parts are not connected, but are separate glyphs, sometimes slightly kerned.
An ij in written Dutch usually represents the diphthong . In standard Dutch, and most Dutch dialects, there are two possible spellings for the diphthong : ij and ei. This causes confusion for schoolchildren, who need to learn which words to write with ei and which with ij. To distinguish between the two, the ij is referred to as the lange ij ("long ij"), the ei as korte ei ("short ei") or simply E – I. In certain Dutch dialects (notably West Flemish and Zeelandic), as well as the Dutch Low Saxon dialects of Low German, a difference in the pronunciation of ei and ij is maintained. Whether pronounced identically to ei or not, the pronunciation of ij is often perceived as being difficult by people who do not have either sound in their native language. The tendency for native English speakers is to pronounce ij as (like the English vowel y, as in by) which does not normally lead to confusion among native listeners, since in a number of dialects (e.g. in Amsterdam, home of the body of water called the IJ) the same pronunciation is heard.
The ij originally represented a 'long i'. This can still be seen in the etymology of some words, and in the Dutch form of several foreign placenames: Berlin and Paris are spelled Berlijn and Parijs. Nowadays, the pronunciation follows the spelling, and they are pronounced with . The IJ is different from the letter Y. It used to be common, in particular when writing in capitals, to write Y instead of IJ. In fact this was the official spelling in the earlier part of the 19th century. That practice has now long been deprecated, but the standard Dutch pronunciation of the letter Y is ij when reading the alphabet. Also, in scientific disciplines such as mathematics and physics, the symbol y is usually pronounced ij. To distinguish the Y from IJ in common speech however, Y is often called Griekse IJ ("Greek Y"), i-grec (the latter from French, with the stress on grec: ), or Ypsilon. In Dutch, the letter Y today only occurs in loanwords, proper names, or in (variantly spelled) old Dutch, while in the related language Afrikaans, Y has completely replaced IJ. Furthermore, the names of Dutch immigrants to the United States, Canada and Australia often were anglicised, so that the IJ became a Y; for example, the surname Spijker often became Spyker while Snijder became Snyder.
The IJ (pronounced ; sometimes shown on old maps as Y or Ye) is a body of water, formerly a bay, in the Dutch province of North Holland. It is known for being Amsterdam's waterfront. It is considered a river by Rijkswaterstaat (a branch of the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment), though some contest this qualification, calling the IJ a lake. Its name is an obsolete Dutch word meaning "water", derived from the West Frisian word ie "stream, small river" (from Germanic *ahwō, "water") and is cognate with Dutch Aa/Ee names for bodies of water.
The name is not an abbreviation or initialism of anything. The name consists of the digraph ij, which behaves like a single letter. Therefore, both letters are capitalized; cf. IJmuiden.