J
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| ISO basic Latin alphabet |
|---|
| AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz |
J is the 10th letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet used today; it was the last of the 26 letters to be added. Its name in English (Template:Pron-en) is spelled jay.[1][2] It was formerly jy (from French ji) and still is in some dialects, mainly in Scottish English, where it is often Template:Pron-en.[1]
History
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.[3] 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[4]. 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.[5] 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).[5] 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.[5] 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.[6] 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.
Codes for computing
class="template-letter-box | In Unicode the capital J is codepoint U+004A and the lowercase j is U+006A. Unicode also has a dot 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 "J" and "j" for upper and lower case respectively.
References
select an article title from: Wikisource:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
- ^ a b "J", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989)
- ^ "J" and "jay", Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993)
- ^ Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch von Matthias Lexer (1878)
- ^ Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana, photographic reproduction by Turin Univerisity, page 5 of PDF file; publishing date in on the last page.
- ^ a b c
Hogg, Richard M. (1992). The Cambridge History of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. p. 39. ISBN 0521264766.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ Wells, John (1982). Accents of English 1: An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 108. ISBN 0521297192.