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= J =
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Introduction
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J, or 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 'jy' .
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
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Egyptian hieroglyph ꜥ Phoenician Yodh Western Greek Iota Etruscan I
Latin I Latin J
|45px |30px |50px |25px |Latin I |Latin J
The letter 'J' used to be used as the swash letter 'I', used for the
letter I at the end of Roman numerals when following another I, as in
XXIIJ or xxiij instead of XXIII or xxiii for the Roman numeral
twenty-three. A distinctive usage emerged 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, 'I' and 'J' were different shapes for the same
letter, both equally representing , , 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 "'y'et").
Use in writing systems
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Pronunciation of by language
Orthography Phonemes
Afrikaans
Albanian
Arabic romanization or
Azeri
Basque , , , , ,
Cantonese (Yale)
Cantonese (Jyutping)
Catalan
(Pinyin)
(Wade-Giles)
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto or
Estonian
Filipino ,
Finnish
French
German
Greenlandic
Hindi (Hunterian)
Hokkien (Pe̍h-ōe-jī, Tâi-lô) ~ , ~
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Italian
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
Tamil romanization
Tatar
Telugu romanization
Turkish
Turkmen
Urdu (Roman)
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 to make a
clear distinction in writing between 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 French. 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'; 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
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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 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).
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 of most of the languages of
India, such as Hindi and Telugu, and stands for in the romanization
of Japanese and Korean.
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 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.
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
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* 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
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* 𐤉 : Semitic letter Yodh, from which the following symbols originally
derive:
* I i : Latin letter I, from which J derives
* ȷ : Dotless j
* ᶡ : Modifier letter small dotless j with stroke
* ᶨ : Modifier letter small j with crossed-tail
* IPA-specific symbols related to J:
* Uralic Phonetic Alphabet-specific symbols related to J:
**
**
**
* J with diacritics: J́ j́ Ĵ ĵ J̌ ǰ Ɉ ɉ J̃ j̇̃
Other representations
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=== Computing ===
:1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows,
ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Unicode also has a dotless variant, ȷ (U+0237). It is primarily used
in Landsmålsalfabet and in mathematics. It is not intended to be used
with diacritics since the normal j is softdotted in Unicode (that is,
the dot is removed if a diacritic is to be placed above; Unicode
further states that, for example, i+ ¨ ≠ ı+¨ and the same holds true
for j and ȷ).
In Unicode, a duplicate of 'J' for use as a special phonetic character
in historical Greek linguistics is encoded in the Greek script block
as ϳ (Unicode U+03F3). It is used to denote the palatal glide in the
context of Greek script. It is called "Yot" in the Unicode standard,
after the German name of the letter J. An uppercase version of this
letter was added to the Unicode Standard at U+037F with the release of
version 7.0 in June 2014.
Wingdings smiley issue
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In the Wingdings font by Microsoft, the letter "J" is rendered as a
smiley face, sometimes creating confusion in emails after formatting
is removed and a smiley turns back into an out-of-context "J". (This
is distinct from the Unicode code point U+263A, which renders as ☺︎).
In Microsoft applications, ":)" is automatically replaced by a smiley
rendered in a specific font face when composing rich text documents or
HTML emails. This autocorrection feature can be switched off or
changed to a Unicode smiley.
License
=========
All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J
