I'm really going out on a limb here, as I am not even a speaker of
Dutch, let alone the Belgian dialect.
It's actually a compound word: hoog "high" + huis "house". Spelling
was different in the past; huis was once spelt huys. The two parts are
pronounced separately. Hoog sounds sort of like ho in "Ho, ho, ho" but
it ends with a slight gargling sound that's the voiced version of the
German "ch".
Huis is a little weird, to the English ear, because the "u" is rather
like the German u-umlaut, and although the "i" is a short vowel, it's
more like the vowel sound in "beet" than "bit". The two vowels are
pronounced as a single diphthong sound that we might write "hue-ees",
just as the English "house" is "ha-oos" (or in Canada, "hae-oos").
Is dat niet zo?
Peter Neilson
Sanford NC
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