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36-732: 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 / ˈ dʒ eɪ / ), with a now-uncommon variant jy / ˈ dʒ aɪ / . 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 / ˈ j ɒ d / or / ˈ j oʊ d / ). The letter J used to be used as
72-513: A lowercase form (also called minuscule ). Upper- and lowercase letters represent the same sound, but serve different functions in writing. Capital letters are most often used at the beginning of a sentence, as the first letter of a proper name or title, or in headers or inscriptions. They may also serve other functions, such as in the German language where all nouns begin with capital letters. The terms uppercase and lowercase originated in
108-549: A variety of modern uses in mathematics, science, and engineering . People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons: The word letter entered Middle English c. 1200 , borrowed from the Old French letre . It eventually displaced the previous Old English term bōcstæf ' bookstaff '. Letter ultimately descends from the Latin littera , which may have been derived from
144-488: A voiced palatal plosive / ɟ / in Konkani , Yoruba and Swahili . In Kiowa , ⟨j⟩ stands for a voiceless alveolar plosive, / t / . ⟨j⟩ stands for / dʒ / in the romanization systems of most of the languages of India , such as Hindi and Telugu , and stands for / dʑ / in the romanization of Japanese and Korean . For Chinese languages , ⟨j⟩ stands for / t͡ɕ / in
180-404: A writing system , a letter is a grapheme that generally corresponds to a phoneme —the smallest functional unit of speech—though there is rarely total one-to-one correspondence between the two. An alphabet is a writing system that uses letters. A letter is a type of grapheme , the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes ,
216-526: A present-day / x / or / h / , 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 ⟨j⟩ . The proper nouns and Latin words are pronounced with the palatal approximant / j / , while words borrowed from foreign languages tend to follow that language's pronunciation of ⟨j⟩ . Until
252-503: Is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages . It was part of the consonant inventory of Old English and can still be found in some dialects of English , most notably in Scottish English , e.g. in loch , broch or saugh (willow). The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ x ⟩, the Latin letter x . It is also used in broad transcription instead of
288-456: Is considered to be a separate letter from ⟨n⟩ , though this distinction is not usually recognised in English dictionaries. In computer systems, each has its own code point , U+006E n LATIN SMALL LETTER N and U+00F1 ñ LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE , respectively. Letters may also function as numerals with assigned numerical values, for example with Roman numerals . Greek and Latin letters have
324-426: Is indicated by the existence of precomposed characters for use with computer systems (for example, ⟨á⟩ , ⟨à⟩ , ⟨ä⟩ , ⟨â⟩ , ⟨ã⟩ .) In the following table, letters from multiple different writing systems are shown, to demonstrate the variety of letters used throughout the world. Voiceless velar fricative The voiceless velar fricative
360-522: 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
396-428: 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. [REDACTED] Letter (alphabet) In
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#1732772015693432-656: Is used to denote the palatal glide /j/ 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. In the Wingdings font by Microsoft , the letter "J" is rendered as a smiley face , sometimes creating confusion in emails after formatting
468-727: The Mandarin Chinese pinyin system, the unaspirated equivalent of ⟨q⟩ ( / t͡ɕʰ / ). In Wade–Giles , ⟨j⟩ stands for Mandarin Chinese / ʐ / . Pe̍h-ōe-jī of Hokkien and Tâi-lô for Taiwanese Hokkien , ⟨j⟩ stands for / z / and / ʑ / , or / d͡z / and / d͡ʑ / , depending on accents. In Cantonese , ⟨j⟩ stands for / j / in Jyutping and / t͡s / in Yale . The Royal Thai General System of Transcription does not use
504-559: The Romance languages , ⟨j⟩ 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 / ʒ / (like ⟨s⟩ in English mea s ure ). In Valencian and Occitan , it has the same sound as in English, / dʒ / . In Spanish , by contrast, it has been both devoiced and backed from an earlier / ʝ / to
540-601: The Uralic languages spoken in Europe, 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 ⟨j⟩ into the Cyrillic alphabet for the same purpose. The Maltese language , though a Semitic language , has been deeply influenced by
576-790: The semivocalic equivalent of the voiceless variant of the close back unrounded vowel ⟨ ɯ̊ ⟩. Features of the voiceless velar fricative: The voiceless velar fricative and its labialized variety are postulated to have occurred in Proto-Germanic , the ancestor of the Germanic languages , as the reflex of the Proto-Indo-European voiceless palatal and velar stops and the labialized voiceless velar stop. Thus Proto-Indo-European * ḱ r̥nom "horn" and * kʷ ód "what" became Proto-Germanic * h urnan and * hw at, where *h and *hw were likely [x] and [xʷ] . This sound change
612-643: 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
648-675: 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 in official writing. ⟨j⟩ is also used to render / j / in dialectal spelling, e.g. Romanesco dialect ⟨ajo⟩ [ajo] (garlic; cf. Italian aglio [aʎo] ). The Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello used ⟨j⟩ in vowel groups in his works written in Italian; he also wrote in his native Sicilian language , which still uses
684-599: The Americas , such as [χ] in Mayan languages ( ALMG alphabet) and a glottal fricative [h] in some spelling systems used for Aymara . In the International Phonetic Alphabet , ⟨ j ⟩ is used for the voiced palatal approximant , and a superscript ⟨ʲ⟩ is used to represent palatalization . Unicode also has a dotless variant, ȷ (U+0237). It is primarily used in Landsmålsalfabet and in mathematics. It
720-593: The Greek diphthera 'writing tablet' via Etruscan . Until the 19th century, letter was also used interchangeably to refer to a speech segment . Before alphabets, phonograms , graphic symbols of sounds, were used. There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters. The earliest examples of which are from Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, dating to c. 3000 BCE . The first consonantal alphabet emerged around c. 1800 BCE , representing
756-785: The Phoenicians, Semitic workers in Egypt. Their script was originally written and read from right to left. From the Phoenician alphabet came the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. From there, the most widely used alphabet today emerged, Latin, which is written and read from left to right. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, nineteen of which the Latin alphabet used, and the Greek alphabet, adapted c. 900 BCE , added four letters to those used in Phoenician. This Greek alphabet
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#1732772015693792-783: The Romance languages (especially Sicilian), and also uses ⟨j⟩ for / j / . In Basque , the diaphoneme represented by ⟨j⟩ has a variety of realizations according to the regional dialect: [j, ʝ, ɟ, ʒ, ʃ, x] (the last one is typical of Gipuzkoa ). Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin script , ⟨j⟩ stands for / ʒ / in Turkish and Azerbaijani , for / ʐ / in Tatar , and for / dʒ / in Indonesian , Somali , Malay , Igbo , Shona , Oromo , Turkmen , and Zulu . It represents
828-513: The Spanish pronunciation of ⟨j⟩ (usually transcribed as a voiceless velar fricative [ x ] , although some varieties of Spanish use glottal [ h ] ). In English, ⟨j⟩ is the fourth least frequently used letter in words, being more frequent only than ⟨ z ⟩ , ⟨ q ⟩ , and ⟨ x ⟩ . It is, however, quite common in proper nouns , especially personal names. In
864-438: The days of handset type for printing presses. Individual letter blocks were kept in specific compartments of drawers in a type case. Capital letters were stored in a higher drawer or upper case. In most alphabetic scripts, diacritics (or accents) are a routinely used. English is unusual in not using them except for loanwords from other languages or personal names (for example, naïve , Brontë ). The ubiquity of this usage
900-629: The distinct forms of ⟨S⟩ , the Greek sigma ⟨Σ⟩ , and Cyrillic es ⟨С⟩ each represent analogous /s/ phonemes. Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z , for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee . Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta ⟨Ζ⟩ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order , which also may vary by language. In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩
936-533: The fricative, used in some spoken languages . The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ ɰ̊ ⟩, but this symbol is not suitable in case of the voiceless velar approximant that is unspecified for rounding (the sound represented by the symbol ⟨ ɰ̊ ⟩ is specified as unrounded), which is best transcribed as ⟨ x̞ ⟩, ⟨ ɣ̞̊ ⟩ or ⟨ ɣ̊˕ ⟩ - see voiced velar approximant . The velar approximant can in many cases be considered
972-897: The influence of Old French , which had a similarly pronounced phoneme deriving from Latin /j/ (for example, i est and later j est ), while the same sound in other positions could be spelled as ⟨dg⟩ (for example, he dg e ). The first English language books to make a clear distinction in writing between ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩ were the King James Bible 1st Revision Cambridge 1629 and an English grammar book published in 1633. Later, many other uses of ⟨i⟩ (later ⟨j⟩ ) were added in loanwords from French and other languages (e.g. ad j oin , j unta ). In loanwords such as bijou or Dijon , ⟨j⟩ may represent /ʒ/ , as in modern French. In some loanwords, including raj , Azerbaijan , Taj Mahal and Beijing ,
1008-549: The initial sound in the English language word " y et"). In English, ⟨j⟩ most commonly represents the affricate /dʒ/ . In Old English , /dʒ/ was represented orthographically with ⟨cᵹ⟩ (equivalent to ⟨cg⟩ , as ⟨ᵹ⟩ in Old English was simply the regular form of the letter G, called Insular G ). Middle English scribes began to use ⟨i⟩ (later ⟨j⟩ ) to represent word-initial /dʒ/ under
1044-571: The late 7th and early 8th centuries. Finally, many slight letter additions and drops were made to the common alphabet used in the western world. Minor changes were made such as the removal of certain letters, such as thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , and eth ⟨Ð ð⟩ . A letter can have multiple variants, or allographs , related to variation in style of handwriting or printing . Some writing systems have two major types of allographs for each letter: an uppercase form (also called capital or majuscule ) and
1080-633: The letter ⟨j⟩ to represent / j / (and sometimes also [dʒ] or [gj], depending on its environment). The great majority of Germanic languages , such as German , Dutch , Icelandic , Swedish , Danish and Norwegian , use ⟨j⟩ for the palatal approximant / j / , which is usually represented by the letter ⟨y⟩ in English. Other than English, notable exceptions are Scots , where it represents / dʒ / , and Luxembourgish , where it represents both / j / and / ʒ / . The letter also represents / j / in Albanian ,
1116-699: The letter ⟨j⟩ , although it is used in some proper names and non-standard transcriptions to represent either จ [tɕ] or ช [tɕʰ] (the latter following Pali / Sanskrit root equivalents). In romanized Pashto , ⟨j⟩ represents ځ, pronounced [dz] . In Greenlandic and in the Qaniujaaqpait spelling of the Inuktitut language, ⟨j⟩ is used to transcribe / j / . Following Spanish usage, ⟨j⟩ represents [x] or similar sounds in many Latin-alphabet-based writing systems for indigenous languages of
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1152-529: The letters recently added in the Italian language ") of 1524. Originally, 'I' and 'J' were different shapes for the same letter, both equally representing /i/ , /iː/ , and /j/ ; however, Romance languages developed new sounds (from former /j/ and /ɡ/ ) that came to be represented as 'I' and 'J'; therefore, English J, acquired from the French J, has a sound value quite different from /j/ (which represents
1188-504: The regular pronunciation /dʒ/ is actually closer to the native pronunciation, making the use of /ʒ/ an instance of hyperforeignism , a type of hypercorrection . Occasionally, ⟨j⟩ represents its original /j/ sound, as in Hallelujah and fjord . In words of Spanish origin, such as jalapeño , English speakers usually pronounce ⟨j⟩ as the voiceless glottal fricative / h / , an approximation of
1224-663: The smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a multigraph . Multigraphs include digraphs of two letters (e.g. English ch , sh , th ), and trigraphs of three letters (e.g. English tch ). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H , Greek eta ⟨Η⟩ , and Cyrillic en ⟨Н⟩ are homoglyphs , but represent different phonemes. Conversely,
1260-452: The symbol ⟨ χ ⟩, the Greek chi , for the voiceless uvular fricative . There is also a voiceless post-velar fricative (also called pre-uvular ) in some languages, which can be transcribed as [x̠] or [χ̟]. For voiceless pre-velar fricative (also called post-palatal ), see voiceless palatal fricative . Some scholars also posit the voiceless velar approximant distinct from
1296-456: Was the first to assign letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels . The Roman Empire further developed and refined the Latin alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the development of lowercase letters began to emerge in Roman writing. At this point, paragraphs, uppercase and lowercase letters, and the concept of sentences and clauses still had not emerged; these final bits of development emerged in
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