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 ."J", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989)"J" and "jay", Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993)
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 GreekIota EtruscanI LatinI LatinJ
The letter J used to be used as the swash glyph of the letter I. It was often used at the end of words and 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.
Antonio de Nebrija (1444–1522) distinguished and as representing separate sounds in his Gramática de la lengua castellana published in 1492.Gramática de la lengua castellana. In the font in which that grammar and Nebrija's Spanish-Latin dictionary (ca. 1495) were published, the lowercase letters and were clearly distinguished, but one and the same glyph was used for the uppercase letters.
Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J in both uppercase and lowercase 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.De le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua Italiana in Italian Wikisource.
Pierre de la Ramée (also known as Petrus Ramus or Peter Ramus, 1515–1572) introduced the distinction into French and Latin. In the 17th century, it was adopted in English. However, even when the letters and were distinguished in print, they used to be often sorted in dictionaries as variants of one and the same leter (for example, jam, iambic, jangle); that practice was common in French dictionaries before 1762 and in English dictionaries before 1820.A New English Dictionary, vol. 5. (1919), p. 531.
Use in writing systems + Pronunciation of by language Orthography Phonemes Notes Afrikaans Albanian Arabic romanization or Azeri Basque , , , , , The letter has a variety of realisations according to the regional dialect: , as pronounced from west to east in south Bizkaia and coastal Lapurdi, central Bizkaia, east Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa, south Navarre, inland Lapurdi and Low Navarre, and Zuberoa, respectively.Trask, R. L. (1997). The History of Basque, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 155–157, . Cantonese (Yale) Cantonese (Jyutping) Catalan /(d)ʒ/ The Spanish is found in loanwords like orujo ('grape liqueur') or La Rioja ('La Rioja'). (Pinyin) (Wade–Giles) Czech Danish and // in some loanwords, like and Dutch English , and in some loanwords, like , , and respectively. Esperanto or Estonian Filipino , Used only in words of foreign origin that have not yet been assimilated into the language. Finnish French in some loanwords, like German and in some loanwords, like and respectively Greenlandic Hindi (Hunterian) Hokkien (Pe̍h-ōe-jī, Tâi-lô) ~ , ~ Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian in the pre-1972 spelling Irish Used only in relatively new loanwords, such as , , and ; not officially part of the Irish alphabet. Typically represents , a non-native phoneme (see Irish phonology) and is substituted with in words like . Italian Used only in loanwords and in some Italian proper names and not part of the alphabet. Japanese (Hepburn) ~ Khmer (ALA-LC) Kiowa Konkani (Roman) Korean (RR) ~ , ~ Kurdish Luxembourgish , Latvian Lithuanian Malay Maltese Manx Norwegian Oromo Pashto romanization Polish Portuguese Romanian Scots Serbo-Croatian Shona Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish ~ Swahili Swedish in some loanwords, like Tamil romanization Tatar Telugu romanization Turkish The letter J represents the sound , which only occurs in loanwords (e.g. ). Turkmen Urdu (Roman) Welsh Only found in loanwords, usually from English but still in wide use such as ('jelly', ) and ('jeans', ) Wu Chinese (Wugniu) , (in some varieties) Yoruba Zulu
English In English, most commonly represents the affricate . In Old English, was represented orthographically with (equivalent to , as in Old English was simply the regular form of the letter G, called Insular G). Middle English scribes began to use (later ) 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 (for example, hedge). The first English-language books clearly distinguishing and were the King James Bible 1st Revision Cambridge 1629 and an English grammar book published in 1633.
Later, many other uses of (later ) were added in loanwords from French and other languages (e.g. adjoin, junta). In loanwords such as bijou or Dijon, may represent , as in modern FrenchIn some loanwords such as Djibouti, it is pronounced as since the French language lacks native affricates and uses and as closure components, all of which are silent in English.. 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, represents its original sound, as in Hallelujah and fjord. In words of Spanish origin, such as jalapeño, English speakers usually pronounce as the voiceless glottal fricative , an approximation of the Spanish pronunciation of (usually transcribed as a voiceless velar fricative , although some varieties of Spanish use glottal ).
In English, is the fourth least frequently used letter in words, being more frequent than only , , and . It is, however, quite common in proper nouns, especially personal names.
Romance languages In the Romance languages, 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 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 . 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 . Until the 19th century, was used instead of non-syllabic in word-initial and intervocalic positions (as in Savoja) and as a replacement for final -ii (pronounced simply , e.g. instead of ); this rule was quite strict in official writing. is also used to render in dialectal spelling, e.g. Romanesco dialect (garlic; Italian aglio ). The Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello used in vowel groups in his works written in Italian; he also wrote in his native Sicilian language, which still uses the letter 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 for the palatal approximant , which is usually represented by the letter 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 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 for .
In Basque, the diaphoneme represented by has a variety of realizations according to the regional dialect: (the last one is typical of Gipuzkoa).
Irish and Welsh are some of the few languages in Europe where stands for , but the letter itself is rare in those languages. In Welsh, is only found in loanwords, usually from English but still in wide use such as ('jelly', ) and ('jeans', ), and in Irish, is only used in relatively new loanwords, such as , , and ; as such, it is not officially part of the Irish alphabet.
Other languages Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin script, 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, stands for a voiceless alveolar plosive, .
stands for in the romanization systems (e. g. IAST) of most of the languages of India, such as Hindi and Telugu, and stands for in the Hepburn romanization of Japanese and for [] ~ [] or [] ~ [] (positional variants of the same phoneme) in the Revised Romanization and North Korean romanization of Korean (only [] ~ [] in McCune–Reischauer).
For Chinese languages, stands for in the Mandarin Chinese pinyin system, the unaspirated equivalent of (). In Wade–Giles, stands for Mandarin Chinese . Pe̍h-ōe-jī of Hokkien and Tâi-lô for Taiwanese Hokkien, stands for and , or and , depending on accents. In Cantonese, stands for in Jyutping and ILE romanization of Cantonese and in Yale.
The Royal Thai General System of Transcription does not use the letter , 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, represents ځ, pronounced .
In Greenlandic and in the Qaniujaaqpait spelling of the Inuktitut language, is used to transcribe .
Following Spanish usage, 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.
In the Kazakh orthography that was used from 1938 to 1940, represented the vowel and corresponded to the modern Kazakh Cyrillic and Latin-script .
Other writing systems In the International Phonetic Alphabet, 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