J

Encyclopedia : J : J : J : J

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For the programming language, see J programming language.

''J# will redirect here due to [Naming_conventions_#Characters not allowed at all in page titlestechnical limitations]. See J Sharp for it.

Latin alphabet Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

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 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 a capital of I.

Petrus Ramus (d. 1572) was the first to make a distinction between I and J. Originally, both I and J were pronounced (see IPA) as [i], [i:], 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 quite different from I.

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 ). In French former dʒ is now pronounced as [ʒ] (as in English measure).