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J ( /ˈdʒeɪ/ or /ˈdʒaɪ/; named jay or jy)^[1][2] is the tenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.

History

The letter j originated as a swash character, used for the letter i at the end of Roman numerals when following another i, as in xxiij instead of xxiii for the Roman numeral representing 23. A distinctive usage emerged in Middle High German.^[3] 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.^[4] Originally, I and J were different shapes for the same letter, both equally representing /i/, /iː/, and /j/; but Romance languages developed new sounds (from former /j/ and /ɡ/) that came to be represented as I and J; therefore, English J, acquired from the French J, has a sound value quite different from /j/ (which represents the sound in the English word "yet").

Use in English

In English J most commonly represents the affricate /dʒ/ (as in jet). In Old English the phoneme /dʒ/ was represented orthographically as cg or cȝ.^[5] Under the influence of Old French, which had a similar phoneme deriving from Latin /j/, English scribes began to use i (later j) to represent word-initial /dʒ/ of Old English (for example, iest, later jest), while using dg elsewhere (for example, hedge).^[5] Later many other uses of i (later j) were added in loan words from French and other languages (e.g. adjoin, junta). The first English-language book to make a clear distinction between i and j was published in 1634.^[5] In loanwords such as raj, "J" may be pronounced /ʒ/ by some, but not all, speakers^[who?]. In some such cases, including raj, Taj Mahal and others, the regular /dʒ/ is actually closer to the original sound of the foreign language, making this realization a hyperforeignism.^[6] Occasionally J represents other sounds, as in Hallelujah which is pronounced the same as "Halleluyah" (See the Hebrew yud for more details).

J is used relatively infrequently in the English language, though it is more commonly used than Q and Z.

Use in other languages

The great majority of Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian use J for the palatal approximant /j/. Notable exceptions are English, Scots and Luxembourgish. J also represents /j/ in Albanian, and those Uralic, Baltic and Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet, such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Latvian and Lithuanian. Some related languages, such as Serbian and Macedonian, also adopted J into the Cyrillic alphabet for the same purpose. Because of this standard, the minuscule letter was chosen to be used in the IPA as the phonetic symbol for the sound.

In the Romance languages J has generally developed from its original palatal approximant value in Latin to some kind of fricative. In French, Portuguese, Catalan, and Romanian it has been fronted to the postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ (like s in English measure). In Spanish, by contrast, it has been both devoiced and backed from an earlier /ʝ/ to a present-day /x ~ h/,^[7] with the actual phonetic realization depending on the speaker's dialect.

In modern standard Italian spelling, only Latin words, proper nouns (such as Jesi, Letojanni, Juventus etc.) or those of foreign languages have J. Until the 19th century, J was used instead of I in diphthongs, as a replacement for final -ii, and in vowel groups (as in Savoja); this rule was quite strict for official writing. J is also used to render /j/ in dialect, e.g. Romanesque ajo for standard aglio (–/ʎ/–) (garlic). The Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello used J in vowel groups in his works written in Italian; he also wrote in his native Sicilian language, which still retains the J.

In Basque, the diaphoneme represented by j has a variety of realizations according to the regional dialect: [j, ʝ, ɟ, ʒ, ʃ, x] (the last one is typical of the Spanish Basque Country).

Among non-European languages which have adopted the Roman alphabet, J stands for /ʒ/ in Turkish, Azerbaijani and Tatar. J stands for /dʒ/ in Indonesian, Somali, Malay, Igbo, Shona, Oromo and Zulu. It represents a voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/ in Konkani, Yoruba and Swahili. In Kiowa, J stands for a voiceless alveolar plosive, /t/. In Chinese Pinyin, J stands for /tɕ/, an unaspirated Q. Thai alphabetic symbol #8 จ จาน cho chan with initial value ch (IPA [tɕ]) and final value t (IPA [t̚]) had been transliterated historically as J or j, and preserved in modern usage in, for example, 19th-century King Jessadabodindra and 20th-century House of Sundarakul na Jolburi; as well as for #10 ช ช้าง cho chang with IPA initial tone variation [tɕʰ] as in the name of 21st-century statesman Abhisit Vejjajiva.

The letter J is generally not used in the modern Celtic languages, except in loanwords. It is also not used frequently in the Native American languages; Gwich'in, Hän, Kaska, Tagish, Tlingit, Navajo, Northern and Southern Tutchone.

Computing codes

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Unicode also has a dotless variant, ȷ (U+0237) for use with combining diacritics.

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 ϳ (Unicode U+03F3). It is used to denote the palatal glide /j/ in the context of Greek script. It is called "Yot" in the Unicode standard, after the German name of the letter J.^[8][9] An uppercase version of this letter is scheduled to appear in future versions of the standard, as U+037F.^[10][11]

In the Wingdings font, the letter "J" is rendered as a smiley face (note this is distinct from the Unicode code point U+263A, which renders as ☺). When attempting to use the Wingdings "J" to produce the smiley in an HTML e-mail, the recipient may not see the intended formatting because HTML e-mail may be unsupported by the recipient's e-mail platform or otherwise disabled. This leads to the appearance of seemingly out-of-place "J"s, leading some to facetiously use an unformatted "J" as a stand-in for a smiley.^[12]

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Juliet	·–––

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

References

External links

• Media related to J at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary entry for J
• The Wiktionary entry for j