J

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

J is the tenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet; it was the last of the 26 letters to be added. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈdʒeɪ/) is spelled jay. It was formerly jy (from French ji) and still is in some dialects, mainly in Scottish English, where it is pronounced /ˈdʒaɪ/.

History

J was originally used 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").

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).

J is used relatively infrequently in the English Language, though it is more commonly used than Q, X or Z.

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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 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/.

Codes for computing

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 "<tt>&amp;#74;</tt>" and "<tt>&amp;#106;</tt>" for upper and lower case respectively.

Translation

The word "J" occurs as such in the following languages: English, Afrikaans, Alemannic, Arabic, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Asturian, Azeri, Min Nan, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Corsican, Welsh, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Esperanto, Basque, Persian, West Frisian, Friulian, Scottish Gaelic, Galician, Gan, Korean, Croatian, Ilokano, Icelandic, Italian, Hebrew, Georgian, Cornish, Swahili, Haitian, Latin, Latvian, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Malagasy, Mazandarani, Malay, Nahuatl, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Norman, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Quechua, Northern Sami, Saterland Frisian, Sicilian, Simple English, Slovak, Slovenian, Finnish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese, Volapük, Yiddish, Yoruba, Cantonese, Samogitian, Chinese.

Translation(s) in other languages: Breton: J (lizherenn), French: J (lettre), Macedonian: J (Латиница), Dutch: J (letter), Uzbek: J (harf), Russian: J (латиница), Serbian: J (слово латинице), Tajik: J (забони барномасозӣ), Turkish: J (harf), Ukrainian: J (латиниця).