J

For other uses of "J", see "J" (disambiguation).

For technical reasons, J# redirects here. For uses of J#, see J Sharp.

J is the tenth letter in the modern Latin alphabet; it was the last of the 26 letters to be added. Its name in English is jay (Template:PronEng). It was formerly jy (from French ji), and in some dialects, mainly of Scottish English, it still is (Template:PronEng). For example this letter is the first letter in the name, Jonathan and deja vu.

History

J was originally an alternative version of I. Its minuscule, j, was used in the Middle Ages as a swash character to end some Roman numerals in place of i. There was an emerging distinctive use 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. 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 /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 cʒ. 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). 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. In loanwords such as raj, "J" may be pronounced /ʒ/ by some, but not all, speakers. 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. Occasionally J represents other sounds, as in Hallelujah which is pronounced the same as "Halleluyah" (See the Hebrew yud for more details).

Use in other languages

The great majority of Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch,Swedish and Danish 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 and Lithuanian. Some languages in these families, such as Serbian, 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 Spanish J stands for /x ~ h/ (which developed from an earlier voiced palatal fricative or affricate), similar to the English "H" sound. However, the actual phonetic realization depends on dialect. In French, Catalan, Portuguese, and Romanian, J is pronounced as a postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ (as in English measure). 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. 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 written in Italian (he also wrote in his native Sicilian language, that still maintains the J).

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 and Zulu. It represents a voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/ in Konkani, Yoruba, Oromo and Swahili. In Kiowa, J stands for a voiceless alveolar plosive, [[voiceless alveolar plosive|/t/]].

The letter J is generally not used in the modern Celtic languages, except in loanwords.

Uses in transcription and transliteration

Linguists from Germany 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, French, and Spanish use of Y for /j/. European linguists also use "j" for the character Й so that e.g. "-ий", a common adjective ending, is transliterated as "-ij". In English transliterations, that ending may be rendered as "-iy" or "-ii". Language students have to learn to find their way among the different possibilities indicated, either by the "j" or by the "y".

In the Pinyin system of transcription of Mandarin Chinese, J represents the palato-alevolar affricate /tɕ/.

Miscellaneous

Some German typefaces of the fraktur or schwabacher types, obsolete since the end of the Second World War, do not necessarily distinguish between the capital I and J. The same character, a 'J' with a top serif of the tilde form, was sometimes used for both. The minuscule i and j, however, were distinguished.

In Thomas Hardy's novel Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Tess's mother writes letters to Angel Clare using "J" as the first person singular pronoun. Although the novel is set in the 19th century, this practice apparently remained in some rural areas.

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

J is used relatively infrequently in the English Language, though it is more commonly used than Q, X or Z. It is also not used frequently in the Native American languages; Gwich'in, Hän, Kaska, Tagish, Tlingit, Navajo, Northern and Southern Tutchone.

The dot above the lowercase "i" and "j" is known as a tittle.

"J" is the only letter that does not appear in the Periodic Table of the Elements (although Jl was once symbol for joliotium, and J alone has been used for iodine). "Q" is only used in temporary systematic chemical symbols.

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, respectively.

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

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "J" and "j" for upper and lower case respectively.