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Help[Facts] Re: Martyntje
in reply to a message by Dorchadas
Thank you for all this excellent information! I do wonder if she might have changed her name from Martijntje to Martyntje when she came to the United States. She was born in Indonesia in the 1920s, immigrated to the Netherlands shortly after World War II, then came to the United States in the early 1960s. Not that Martyntje would be a whole lot easier for English speakers, but it is something to ponder.
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"Martyntje" isn't a rare variant, it's an old-fashioned transliteration. "Y" is "IJ" in cursive form, & was commonly used before Dutch orthography was simplified in the 1800s. "IJ" in Dutch is its own letter (pronounced like a very broad [AI], like the vowel sound in "bright", but almost with a Southern drawl). So you might see in written form "Martijn" or "Martyn" & they would be seen as the same spelling, except that in the second the individual letters of "ij" are joined.
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