#lingblr

in intro to ling classes we sometimes talk about whistled languages as another modality, or drummed languages¹; but i think in actuality most linguists you ask would say that those modalities are a language technology, just as writing is. writing is a technology that enables us to language through an alternative modality, but it's vanishingly rare (or maybe nonexistant) for anyone to acquire writing as their first language modality. signed and spoken (and tactile-signed) languages, however, are acquired by babies as their first languages.

What does it say in the image? It says minimum. Hard to read? Medieval scribes thought so too. That's why they invented the dot on the i. This way, you could at least see which strokes represented vowels - and that helped a lot.

For similar reasons, the letter j was invented. Two consecutive dotless ı's looked a lot like the letter u. A Middle Dutch word such as dııc ('dike') could be mistaken for duc ('often'). That's why the second ı was lengthened to ȷ: dıȷc.

The text continues after the image.

The letters ıı/ıȷ/ij originally represented the long ee sound as in English freeze, phonetically [iː]. However, in the 14th century, this sound started to become a diphthong in certain regions, initially close to what you hear in Cockney me: [ɪj]. Later, it became similar to English ay in may. In certain regions in The Netherlands and Flanders, it eventually became the diphthong heard in my.

Nowadays, ij is considered a digraph: two letters representing one sound. Some even insist it's one single letter (and they can be very vocal about it). At any rate, ij is always capitalised as a whole: ijs becomes IJs if it's the first word of a sentence. On signs like the one below, both letters are often put in the same box.