J is the tenth letter of the Latin alphabet.
History
J was originally only a capital letter, therefore, some people still write their names as Jsabel, Jnes instead of Isabel, Ines in the German-speaking world, and in Italy, in pre-modern use one also sometimes encounters J as a capital of I.
The Humanistic scholar Pierre de la Ramée (d. 1572) was the first to make a distinction between I and J. Originally, both I and J were pronounced as [i], [i:], and [j]; but Romance languages developed new sounds (from former [j] and [g]) that came to be represented as I and J; therefore, English J (from French J) has a sound quite different from I.
In other Germanic languages J stands for /j/. This is also true of Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet as well as Hungarian and Albanian.
In modern standard Italian only foreign or Latin words have J. Until the 19th century, J was used instead of I in diphthongs, as a replacement for final -ii, or in vowels groups (as in Savoja); this rule was quite strict for official writing. J is also used for rendering words in dialect, where it stands for /j/, e.g. Romanesque ajo for standard aglio (garlic).
In Spanish J stands for /x/ (that in some cases developed from the /dZ/ sound, i.e. the same sound that English still has). In French former /dZ/ is now pronounced as /Z/ (as in English measure).
In Turkish, Azeri and Tatar J is always prounced [Z]. (see SAMPA for meaning of all those phonetic symbols).
Hebrew also influenced the English J, where it was sometimes pronounced as [y] in transcription (linguistics) (sometimes called transliteration.) The classic example is Hallelujah which is pronounced the same as Halleluyah. See the Hebrew yod for more details.
Alternate representations
Juliet represents the letter J in the NATO phonetic alphabet.
In international Morse code the letter J is DitDahDahDah: · - - -
In Braille the letter J is represented as ⠚ (in Unicode), the dot pattern,
.X
XX
..
Computing
In Unicode the capital J is codepoint U+004A and the lowercase j is U+006A.
The ASCII code for capital J is 74 and for lowercase j is 106; or in binary 01001010 and 01101010, correspondingly.
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.
Meanings for J
- In the documentary hypothesis of the Hebrew Bible, J is a commonly used abbreviation for the Jehovist or Yahwist source.
- In calendars, J is often the abbreviation for the months January, June, and July.
- In computing, it refers to the J programming language
- In international licence plate codes, J stands for Japan.
- In mathematics, j is one of the three imaginary units of quaternions.
- In the Metric system, J is the symbol for the joule, the SI derived unit for energy.
- In 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).
- In high-energy physics, J is one of the two names of the J/Psi particle
- In a deck of playing cards, J is used to mark each of the jacks.
- In radio, J is the name of an Atlanta radio station, WVFJ FM
- A J can be a slang term for a spliff (marijuana cigarette)
- J Records is a record label
See also
Ĵ
Two-letter combinations starting with J:
Letter-digit combinations starting with J:
- J0 J1 J2 J3 J4 J5 J6 J7 J8 J9
Last updated: 02-09-2005 23:00:51
Last updated: 05-03-2005 17:50:55
