Gijs van Dam

If you're not Dutch, my name can be hard to pronounce, especially my first name. Let's explain first that weird i and j in my name. That's a digraph, a pair of letters used to write one distinct sound, and it's common in the Dutch language. The ij is often considered to be the 25th letter of the Dutch alphabet and in some fonts is represented by a separate character. So in a way my first name consists of three letters.

So far for the theory, now for the practice. My first name is pronounced a little bit like the English guys, only the g is pronounced as if you clear your throat. It sounds a little bit like the Spanish j in Juan or the Scottish ch in Loch Nes. It's that typical sound the Dutch make, that makes our language sound as if we're always quarreling with each other. 

The second word in my name, van, isn't my second name, but it's part of my last name. It's an infix meaning of or from and should be ignored when sorting alphabetically on last name. So you would find me under the D. You see infixes often concatenated with the last name in American family names, like Vanderbilt. Immigrants in the New World often anglicized their names, and concatenating the infix with your last name was one way of doing that.

Van is pronounced like the English van (meaning truck) but with the a pronounced as the a in star but shorter.

My last name is Dam as in Hoover Dam and not only does it have the same meaning as the English word dam (not surprisingly many Dutch names have to do with sea or water and have meanings like dike, dam, dune or polder). It's also pronounced in the same way, but with the same adjustment we made previously for the infix. So the a should be pronounced as the a in star but shorter.

And there you go: Gijs van Dam