J

J originated 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 /ɡ/) 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").

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 jam, "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).

The great majority of Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian 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, Latvian 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 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 used J in vowel groups in his works written in Italian (he also wrote in his native Sicilian language, that still maintains the J).

[ see less ]