By historical times, this verb is used almost exclusively as part of the quotative in its various forms.
Alternative forms
Noun
m
Usage notes
The above quotes constitute all the known attestations of this word.
Alternative forms
Noun
m
Alternative forms
References
- Allen, James [2013] A New Concordance of the Pyramid Texts, volume V, Providence: Brown University, PT 609.18–22 [Pyr. 1708a–1708f], M
- ↑ Allen, James [2005] The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, page 230
- Allen, James [2013] A New Concordance of the Pyramid Texts, volume V, Providence: Brown University, PT 609.18–22 [Pyr. 1708a–1708f], N
Esperanto
Pronunciation
Letter
j [lower case, upper case ]
See also
Estonian
Pronunciation
Letter
j [lower case, upper case ]
See also
Faroese
Pronunciation
Letter
j [upper case ]
See also
Finnish
Pronunciation
Letter
j [lower case, upper case ]
See also
French
Pronunciation
Letter
j [lower case, upper case ]
Fula
Pronunciation
Letter
j [lower case, upper case ]
Usage notes
See also
Gothic
Romanization
j
Hungarian
Pronunciation
Letter
j [lower case, upper case ]
Declension
See also
Further reading
- j in Bárczi, Géza and László Országh. A magyar nyelv értelmező szótára [‘The Explanatory Dictionary of the Hungarian Language’]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1959–1962. Fifth ed., 1992: →ISBN
Icelandic
Pronunciation
Letter
j [upper case ]
See also
Ido
Pronunciation
- [context pronunciation] IPA[key]: /ʒ/
- [letter name] IPA[key]: /ʒe/
Letter
j [upper case ]
See also
Indonesian
Pronunciation
Letter
j [lower case, upper case ]
See also
Italian
Letter
j m or f [invariable]
Karelian
Pronunciation
Letter
j [upper case ]
See also
Latvian
Etymology
Proposed in 1908 as part of the new Latvian spelling by the scientific commission headed by K. Mīlenbahs, which was accepted and began to be taught in schools in 1909. Prior to that, Latvian had been written in German Fraktur, and sporadically in Cyrillic.
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 /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 the initial sound in the English language word "yet"].
Pronunciation and use
English
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.
Other languages
Germanic and Eastern-European languages
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. Notable exceptions are English, Scots and [to a lesser degree] Luxembourgish. ⟨j⟩ also represents /j/ in Albanian, and those Uralic, Slavic and Baltic languages that use the Latin alphabet, such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, 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. Because of this standard, the lower case letter was chosen to be used in the IPA as the phonetic symbol for the sound.
Romance languages
In 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 measure]. 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 a present-day /x/ or /h/, with the actual phonetic realization depending on the speaker's dialect.
Generally, ⟨j⟩ is not commonly present in modern standard Italian spelling. Only proper nouns [such as Jesi and Letojanni], Latin words [Juventus], or those borrowed from foreign languages have ⟨j⟩. The proper nouns and Latin words are pronounced as the palatal approximant /j/, while words borrowed from foreign languages tend to follow that language's pronunciation of ⟨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 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 the letter ⟨j⟩ to represent /j/ [and sometimes also [dʒ] or [gj], depending on its environment].
Other European Languages
The Maltese language is a Semitic language, not a Romance language; but has been deeply influenced by them [especially Sicilian] and it uses ⟨j⟩ for the sound /j/ [cognate of the Semitic yod].
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].
Non-European languages
Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin script, ⟨j⟩ stands for /ʒ/ in Turkish and Azerbaijani, for /ʐ/ in Tatar. ⟨j⟩ stands for /dʒ/ in Indonesian, Somali, Malay, Igbo, Shona, Oromo, Turkmen, and Zulu. It represents 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 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 Jyutping for Cantonese, ⟨j⟩ stands for /j/.
The Royal Thai General System of Transcription does not use 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 the Americas, such as [χ] in Mayan languages [ALMG alphabet] and a glottal fricative [h] in some spelling systems used for .
Computing codes
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 /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.
Wingdings smiley issue
In the Wingdings font by Microsoft, the letter "J" is rendered as a smiley face [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 email. This autocorrection feature can be switched off or changed to a Unicode smiley.