J

For the programming language, see J programming language.

J# redirects here due to technical limitations.

The letter J is the tenth of the Latin alphabet; it was the last to be added to that alphabet. Its name in English is jay [dʒeɪ]. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [j] represents the palatal approximant. It is also the only letter not to appear in the Periodic Table. On alphanumeric keyboards using the QWERTY layout, the F and J keys generally have a raised bar (perceptible to the touch) over them to assist in touch typing. All other keys can be found with their relative positions around these two keys as the index finger is generally used to type the F and the J. Only about .06% of letters in English, .22% in Spanish, and .29% in French on average are js. It is the 24th-most frequent letter in English, the 23rd-most frequent in Spanish, and the 21st-most frequent in French.¹

History

The letter is, in its origin, a comparatively late modification of the letter I. In the ancient Roman alphabet, I, besides its vowel value in ibīdem, mīlitis, had the kindred consonantal value of modern English Y, as in iactus, iam, Iouem, iūstus, adiūro, maior, peior. Some time before the 6th century, this y-sound had, by compression in articulation, and consequent development of an initial “stop”, become a consonantal diphthong, passing through a sound /dj/, akin to that of our di, de, in odious, hideous, to that represented in our phonetic symbolization by /dʒ/. At the same time, the original guttural sound of G, when followed by a front vowel, had changed to that of palatal g /ɟ, gj/, and then, by an advance of the point of closure, had passed through that of /dj/, to the same sound /dʒ/ so that i consonant and the so-called g “soft” came to have, in the Romanic languages, the same identical value. In Italian, this new sound is represented by g before e and i, gi before a, o, and u. Thus, Latin gestus, Iēsūs, iam, iocāre, iūdicem, are represented in Italian by gesto, Gesù, già, giocare, giudice. But in the other Romanic languages, the letter I was retained with the changed sound, so that, in these, i consonant and g “soft” were equivalent symbols, distinguished only by derivation. In Old French the foregoing words were gest, Iesu, ia, ioer, iuge.

In Old English, i consonant, so far as it was used, had (as still in all the continental Germanic languages) its Latin value /j/, equivalent to Old English e, i, or e before certain vowels; thus we find iá, iól, iow, iú, iuoð, iung, as occasional spellings of the words commonly written eá, eól, eow, eó (ió, iú), eooð (iooð), eong (iong, iung). This was especially the case with foreign proper names and other words known through Latin, as Ianuarius, Iob, Iofes (“Jove”), Iudéa, Iudéisc, iacinÞ, and the ethnic name Iótas, Iútan (rarely Eotas), now rendered “Jutes”. But the French orthography introduced by the Norman Conquest brought in the Old French value of the i consonant as g “soft” /dʒ/; a sound which English has ever since retained in words derived from that source, although in French itself the sound was subsequently, by loss of its first element, simplified to /ʒ/.

From the 11th to the 17th century, then, the letter I i represented at once the vowel sound of i, and a consonant sound /dʒ/, far removed from the vowel. Meanwhile, the minuteness and inconspicuousness of the small ı, and its liability, especially in cursive writing, to be confounded with one of the strokes of an adjacent letter, had led in mediæval Latin and general European writing, and thus also in English, to various scribal expedients in order to keep it distinct. (See I.) Among these, an initial ı was often prolonged above or below the line, or both; a final ı was generally prolonged below the line, and in both cases the prolonged part or “tail” came at length in cursive writing to be terminated with a curve; thus arose the forms File:Dotless lower-case j.gif and File:Dotless lower-case tailless j.gif. The “dot”, used to individualize the minuscule i, was also used with the tailed form, and thus came the modern j, j. But this was at first merely a final form of i, used in Latin in such forms as “filij”, and in numerals, as j, ij, iij, vj, viij, xij. It was very little used in English, where y had previously been substituted for final i; and it was not till the 17th century that the device of utilizing the two forms of the letter, so that i, i, should remain as the vowel, and j, j, be used for the consonant, was established, and the capital forms of the latter, J, File:Plantin J.gif, were introduced.

Some believe that Petrus Ramus (d. 1572) was the first to make a distinction between I and J. The differentiation was probably made first in Spanish though, where, from the very introduction of printing, we see j used for the consonant, and i only for the vowel. For the capitals, I had at first to stand for both (as it still does in German type, and in all varieties of Gothic or Black Letter); but before 1600 a capital J consonant began to appear in Spanish. (See, for example, John Minsheu’s Spanish dictionary of 1599, where I and J are strictly distinguished, though the I and J words are put in one series.) In German typography, almost from the first, some printers employed a tailed form of the letter File:Dotless lower-case j.gif or j initially, to distinguish the consonant sound; but this was by no means generally established till much later. According to Watt (Bibliotheca Britannica), Louis Elzevir, who printed at Leyden 1595­-1616, is generally credited with making the modern distinction of u and v, i and j, “which was shortly after followed by the introduction of U and J among the capitals by Lazarus Zetzner of Strasburg in 1619”. In England, individual attempts to differentiate i and j were made already in the 16th century, as by Richard Day, who printed books in London after 1578, and George Bishop, who printed the translation of La Primaudaye’s French Academie in 1586, with i, j, u, v, differentiated as in modern use, but had no capital J or U. The J j types are not used in the Bible of 1611, nor in the text of the Shakespeare Folio of 1623; these have I i for both values; but the latter has a capital Italic J in headlines in the proper names File:Plantin J.gifohn, File:Plantin J.gifuliet, File:Plantin J.gifulius, and in the colophon, list of actors, etc., thus showing a tendency to use this (in its origin merely an ornamental variety of I) as a J. In Cotgrave’s French-English Dictionary printed in 1611 (and in the reprint of it in 1632), the Roman type used for the French has no capital J, and uses I with both values, but it has the small j which is regularly used in the French words: thus Iustice, Ajuster. On the other hand, the italic type, in which the English is printed, has no small j, and uses i for both vowel and consonant; it has the two capitals, I and J, but uses them indiscriminately for the consonant: thus Ioyau: masculine A File:Plantin J.gifewell; Ioyaulier: masculine A Ieweller. Frequently J is used also for the vowel: thus Ingenieusement: File:Plantin J.gifngeniously; Ingenieux: Ingenious. Thus even when the types I and J were at hand, their use was not yet regulated. But during the decade which followed 1625, J, j, File:Plantin J.gif, appear to have been gradually added to all founts of type, and the present usage of restricting I i to the vowel, J j to the consonant appears to have been generally established soon after 1630. (See, under U and V, the similar differentiation of U u vowel, and V v consonant, from the earlier V v initial, u medial and final.)

But though the differentiation of I and J, in form and value, was thus completed before 1640, the feeling that they were, notwithstanding, merely forms of the same letter continued for many generations; a vestige of it is still seen in the practice of many persons, who in script write the I form (File:Script I.gif) for both File:Script I.gif and File:Script J.gif, and in the omission by printers of J and U from the signatures of the sheets of books. In dictionaries, the I and J words continued to be intermingled in one series down to the 19th century. Dr. Johnson, indeed, under the letter I, says “I is in English considered both as a vowel and consonant; though, since the vowel and consonant differ in their form as well as sound, they may be more properly accounted two letters”. Nevertheless, he proceeds to treat them practically as one, his first word I being followed by File:Plantin J.gifabber; File:Plantin J.gifam by Iambick, and this by File:Plantin J.gifangle; while the three last words of I are File:Plantin J.gifuxtaposition, Ivy, File:Plantin J.gifymold. The same practice was followed by Todd, and by Richardson 1820, and even in some later dictionaries. Joddrell in 1820, Webster in 1828, separate I and J, as independent letters. The name of the letter, now jay /dʒeɪ/, was formerly jy /dʒaɪ/, rhyming with I, and corresponding to French ji; this is still common in Scotland and elsewhere.

In printing manuscripts or reprinting books produced before the differentiation of I and J, the earlier I has been treated in two different ways. The earlier editors, in most cases, introduced the modern usage into their texts, changing the I of the archetype, when it stood for the consonant, into J. Later editors more usually aim at reproducing the actual form of the original, and retain I with its twofold value. As our quotations are, in the main, from printed editions of manuscripts, and in some cases from later editions of printed books, they necessarily reflect these differences of editorial practice, and often show J before the 17th century; it is to be remembered that this is usually due to the edition quoted, not to the original scribe or printer.

In some modern editions of manuscript or Black-letter books, in which the minuscule i of the original text is reproduced, we yet find a capital J introduced. This arises probably from the circumstance that the manuscript or Italic J, or Black-letter File:Black Letter J.gif, is more like a J than an I in appearance, and is actually still used both for I and J.

No word beginning with J is of Old English derivation. Many are from Latin, chiefly through French; some from Greek, and a few from Hebrew and Arabic. There are also numerous modern words from distant languages, Eastern or Western, as jaguar, jalap, jerboa, jungle, junk. Besides these, many familiar or colloquial words of recent appearance and obscure history begin with this letter. On account of the phonetic equivalence of i consonant (i.e. j) and g “soft” in words from Romanic, while in native English words, as girl, get, g was “hard”, there was a considerable tendency in Middle English to substitute i (= j) for g in words from French, as in gemme, iemme, gentil, ientyl, gest, iest, (and occasionally a counter tendency to use g for i (j), as in iet, jet, geat, maiestie, majesty, magestie), of which traces still remain in gest, jest, sergeant, serjeant, jelly from French gelée, etc.²

Other than English, the Germanic languages use J for the sound [j]. This is true of Hungarian, Albanian, Finnish, and Estonian where it can never be a fricative. Further, those Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet (or adopted J into the Cyrillic, as in Serbian) use this letter for the same purpose. Because of this standard, the minuscule letter was chosen by IPA as the phonetic symbol for the sound.

Linguists from Germany and Central Europe also took up this letter in transliterations from those Slavic languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet. Specifically, the "E" in Russian is sometimes transliterated "je" (with the "IO" becoming "jo" sometimes); the "YA" is transliterated as "ja"; and the character "YU" is transliterated "ju" - whereas the linguists from America and the English speaking world use "y" in place of "j" because it produces fewer mistakes there. European linguists also use this for the character J so that their transliterations of nominative case of adjectives ("-IJ") end in "-ij" whereas in American transliterations it's "-ii". The student who uses the American transliteration has to remember that the second "i" is different from the first in the original.

In modern standard Italian only foreign or Latin words have J. Until the 19th century, J was used instead of I in diphthongs, as a replacement for final -ii, or in vowels groups (as in Savoja); this rule was quite strict for official writing. J is also used for rendering words in dialect, where it stands for [j], e.g. Romanesque ajo for standard aglio (garlic). The Italian Novelist Luigi Pirandello utilised J in vowels group in his works.

In Spanish J stands for [x ~ h] (which in some cases developed from the [dʒ] sound, i.e. the same sound that English still represents orthographically by <j>). In French former dʒ is now pronounced as [ʒ] (as in English measure).

In Portuguese, Turkish, Azeri and Tatar J is always prounced [ʒ].

Hebrew also influenced the English J, which in a few cases is used for [j] in place of the more normal Y. The classic example is Hallelujah which is pronounced the same as Halleluyah. See the Hebrew yodh for more details.

Codes for computing

class="template-letter-box | In Unicode the capital J is codepoint U+004A and the lowercase j is U+006A.

The ASCII code for capital J is 74 and for lowercase j is 106; or in binary 01001010 and 01101010, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital J is 209 and for lowercase j is 145.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "&#74;" and "&#106;" for upper and lower case respectively.

Meanings for j

The minuscule letter j can refer to:

• The index variable after i
• The imaginary unit (${\sqrt {-1}}$), in fields such as physics and electrical engineering where i is traditionally used to denote a changing current)

Special Uses in German

The Germans write this letter differently from what is pictured above. They like to put a long serif on top, but only to the left of the character.

They readily make use of Roman numerals (which use the letter "I" but not the letter "J"), so when listing things by capital letters of the alphabet, they disdain to use the letter I for purposes of safety, skipping over to J. For example, in every regiment in the German Army there is what would be expressed in English as a "J company" but no "I company."

Regional meanings

• The international license plate code for Japan;
• As the first letter of a postal code in Canada, J is used for the western and northern regions of Quebec;
• On the New York City Subway system, J is a rapid transit service running from Downtown Manhattan to Jamaica.
• J is also used to denote Jayalalitha a Tamil actress, politician and chief minister of Tamil nadu
• J is also the name of a very well known Tamil artist Jeyaraj
• J is a German mintmark, which stands for the city of Hamburg.

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  ¹Cryptography, “Letter Frequencies” (Computer Science: Trinity College) <http://starbase.trincoll.edu/~crypto/resources/LetFreq.html> [Accessed May 1, 2006].
  ²A New English Dictionary, vol. 5, (Clarendon Press: Oxford) p. 531.