J

For other uses, see J (disambiguation).

J# redirects here for technical reasons; see J Sharp.

The letter J is the tenth letter in the Latin alphabet; it was the last to be added to that alphabet. Its name in English is jay /dʒeɪ/. In some dialects, especially in Scotland and Ireland, it is pronounced as "jye" (cockney).

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.

History

J was originally an alternative version of I. There was an emerging distinctive use in Middle High German. Petrus Ramus (d. 1572) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds. Originally, both I and J represented /i/, /iː/, and /j/; but Romance languages developed new sounds (from former /j/ and /g/) that came to be represented as I and J; therefore, English J (from French J) has a sound value quite different from /i/.

All the Germanic languages except English use J for /j/. This is also true of Hungarian, Albanian, Finnish, and Estonian. 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 Germania and Central Europe also took up this letter in transliterations from those Slavic languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet. Specifically, the "Е" in Russian is sometimes transliterated "je" (with the "Ё" becoming "jo"); the "Я" is transliterated as "ja"; and the character "Ю" is transliterated "ju" - whereas the linguists from America and the English speaking world use "y" in place of "j" because of English and Spanish use of Y for /j/. European linguists also use this for the character Й 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 spelling, only Latin words 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. And 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 vowel groups in his works.

In Spanish J stands for /x ~ h/ (which developed from an earlier affricate /dʒ/); the actual phonetic realization depends on dialect. In French former /dʒ/ is now pronounced as /ʒ/ (as in English measure).

In Portuguese, Romanian, Turkish, Azerbaijani and Tatar J always represents /ʒ/.

Hebrew also influenced the English J, which in a few cases is used 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.

J is used relatively infrequently in the English Language, though it is more commonly used than Q, X or Z.

Many personal names common in English-speaking societies begin with J (e.g., John, James, Jason, Jacob, Joshua, Jane, Julia, Jessica, Jenny, Jill, Jimmy).

Codes for computing

class="template-letter-box | In Unicode the capital J is codepoint U+004A and the lowercase j is U+006A. Unicode also has a dotless variant, ȷ (U+0237) for use with combining diacritics.

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. w4karhlgaiwek-g9<4 The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "&#74;" and "&#106;" for upper and lower case respectively.

Meanings of J

See J (disambiguation).

Special Uses in German and Swedish

In Germany and Sweden, this letter is often written with a long serif on top, but only to the left of the character.

See also

• I
• Tittle