J

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J (minuscule: j) is the tenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other Western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual name in English is jay (pronounced ), with a now-uncommon variant jye .

File:J cursiva.gif

Writing "J" in cursive

When used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiced palatal approximant (the sound of "y" in "yes") it may be called yod or jod (pronounced or ).

History

Egyptian hieroglyph ꜥ	Phoenician Yodh	Western Greek Iota	Etruscan I	Latin I	Latin J
Egyptian Hieroglyph describing an arm	File:PhoenicianI-01.svg	File:Greek Iota normal.svg	File:EtruscanI-01.svg	Latin I	Latin J

File:Childs new plaything 1743 alphabet.jpg

Children's book from 1743, showing I and J considered to be the same letter

The letter J used to be used as the swash letter I at the end of Roman numerals when following another I, as in XXIIJ or xxiij instead of XXIII or xxiii for the Roman numeral twenty-three. Both these letters (or variants of the same letter) equally represented , , and ; however, Romance languages developed new sounds (from former and ) that came to be represented as 'I' and 'J'; therefore, English J, acquired from the French J, has a sound value quite different from (which represents the initial sound in the English language word "yet"). Such a distinctive usage emerged in Middle High German.

Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana ("Trissino's epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language") of 1524.

Use in writing systems

English

In English, Template:Angbr most commonly represents the affricate Template:IPAlink. In Old English, was represented orthographically with Template:Angbr (equivalent to Template:Angbr, as Template:Angbr in Old English was simply the regular form of the letter G, called Insular G). Middle English scribes began to use Template:Angbr (later Template:Angbr) to represent word-initial under the influence of Old French, which had a similarly pronounced phoneme deriving from Latin (for example, iest and later jest), while the same sound in other positions could be spelled as Template:Angbr (for example, hedge). The first English language books clearly distinguishing Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr were the King James Bible 1st Revision Cambridge 1629 and an English grammar book published in 1633.

Later, many other uses of Template:Angbr (later Template:Angbr) were added in loanwords from French and other languages (e.g. adjoin, junta). In loanwords such as bijou or Dijon, Template:Angbr may represent , as in modern French. In some loanwords, including raj, Azerbaijan and Beijing, the regular pronunciation is actually closer to the native pronunciation, making the use of an instance of hyperforeignism, a type of hypercorrection. Occasionally, Template:Angbr represents its original sound, as in Hallelujah and fjord. In words of Spanish origin, such as jalapeño, English speakers usually pronounce Template:Angbr as the voiceless glottal fricative , an approximation of the Spanish pronunciation of Template:Angbr (usually transcribed as a voiceless velar fricative , although some varieties of Spanish use glottal ).

In English, Template:Angbr is the fourth least frequently used letter in words, being more frequent than only Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr, and Template:Angbr. It is, however, quite common in proper nouns, especially personal names.

Romance languages

In the Romance languages, Template:Angbr has generally developed from its original palatal approximant value in Latin to some kind of fricative. In French, Portuguese, Catalan (except Valencian), and Romanian it has been fronted to the postalveolar fricative (like Template:Angbr in English measure). In Valencian and Occitan, it has the same sound as in English, . In Spanish, by contrast, it has been both devoiced and backed from an earlier to a present-day or , with the actual phonetic realization depending on the speaker's dialect.

⟨j⟩ is not commonly used in modern standard Italian spelling. Only proper nouns (such as Jesi and Letojanni), Latin words (Juventus), or words borrowed from foreign languages have Template:Angbr. The proper nouns and Latin words are pronounced with the palatal approximant , while words borrowed from foreign languages tend to follow that language's pronunciation of Template:Angbr. Until the 19th century, Template:Angbr was used instead of non-syllabic Template:Angbr in word-initial and intervocalic positions (as in Savoja) and as a replacement for final -ii; this rule was quite strict in official writing. Template:Angbr is also used to render in dialectal spelling, e.g. Romanesco dialect Template:Angbr (garlic; Template:Cf.Italian aglio ). The Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello used Template:Angbr in vowel groups in his works written in Italian; he also wrote in his native Sicilian language, which still uses the letter Template:Angbr to represent (and sometimes also [dʒ] or [gj], depending on its environment).

Other European languages

The great majority of Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, use Template:Angbr for the palatal approximant , which is usually represented by the letter Template:Angbr in English. Other than English, notable exceptions are Scots, where it represents , and Luxembourgish, where it represents both and .

The letter also represents in almost all of Europe such as Albanian, the Uralic languages that use the Latin script, and those Slavic and Baltic languages that use the Latin alphabet, such as Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Latvian and Lithuanian. Some related languages, such as Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, also adopted Template:Angbr into the Cyrillic alphabet for the same purpose.

The Maltese language, though a Semitic language, has been deeply influenced by the Romance languages (especially Sicilian), and also uses Template:Angbr for .

In Basque, the diaphoneme represented by Template:Angbr has a variety of realizations according to the regional dialect: (the last one is typical of Gipuzkoa).

Other languages

Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin script, Template:Angbr stands for in Turkish and Azerbaijani, for in Tatar, and for in Indonesian, Somali, Malay, Igbo, Shona, Oromo, Turkmen, and Zulu. It represents a voiced palatal plosive in Konkani, Yoruba and Swahili. In Kiowa, Template:Angbr stands for a voiceless alveolar plosive, .

Template:Angbr stands for in the romanization systems of most of the languages of India, such as Hindi and Telugu, and stands for in the romanization of Japanese and Korean.

For Chinese languages, Template:Angbr stands for in the Mandarin Chinese pinyin system, the unaspirated equivalent of Template:Angbr (). In Wade–Giles, Template:Angbr stands for Mandarin Chinese . Pe̍h-ōe-jī of Hokkien and Tâi-lô for Taiwanese Hokkien, Template:Angbr stands for and , or and , depending on accents. In Cantonese, Template:Angbr stands for in Jyutping and in Yale.

The Royal Thai General System of Transcription does not use the letter Template:Angbr, although it is used in some proper names and non-standard transcriptions to represent either or (the latter following Pali/Sanskrit root equivalents).

In romanized Pashto, Template:Angbr represents ځ, pronounced .

In Greenlandic and in the Qaniujaaqpait spelling of the Inuktitut language, Template:Angbr is used to transcribe .

Following Spanish usage, Template:Angbr represents or similar sounds in many Latin-alphabet-based writing systems for indigenous languages of the Americas, such as in Mayan languages (ALMG alphabet) and a glottal fricative [h] in some spelling systems used for Aymara.

Other writing systems

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, Template:Angbr IPA is used for the voiced palatal approximant, and a superscript ⟨ʲ⟩ is used to represent palatalization.

Other uses

• In international licence plate codes, J stands for Japan.
• In mathematics, j is one of the three imaginary units of quaternions.
• Also in mathematics, j is one of the three unit vectors.
• In the Metric system, J is the symbol for the joule, the SI derived unit for energy.
• In some areas of physics, electrical engineering and related fields, j is the symbol for the imaginary unit (the square root of −1) (in other fields, the letter i is used, but this would be ambiguous as it is also the symbol for current).
• A J can be a slang term for a joint (marijuana cigarette)

Related characters

• 𐤉 : Semitic letter Yodh, from which the following symbols originally derive:
• I i : Latin letter I, from which J derives
• ȷ : Dotless j
• ᶡ : Modifier letter small dotless j with stroke
• ᶨ : Modifier letter small j with crossed-tail
• IPA-specific symbols related to J: Template:Nounderlines
• Uralic Phonetic Alphabet-specific symbols related to J:
• J with diacritics: J́ j́ Ĵ ĵ J̌ ǰ Ɉ ɉ J̃ j̇̃

Other representations

Computing

• (primarily used in the Swedish Dialect Alphabet, , and in mathematics).

In Unicode, a duplicate of 'J' for use as a special phonetic character in historical Greek linguistics is encoded in the Greek script block as for the uppercase and for the lowercase. It is used to denote the palatal glide in the context of Greek script. It is called "Yot" in the Unicode standard, after the German name of the letter J. An uppercase version of this letter was added to the Unicode Standard at U+037F with the release of version 7.0 in June 2014.

Wingdings smiley issue

In the Wingdings font by Microsoft, the letter "J" was rendered as a smiley face, sometimes creating confusion in emails after formatting is removed and a smiley turned back into an out-of-context "J".

External links

• Template:Wiktionary-inline
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