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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 Rame (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 in Finnish (where it can never be a fricative), 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.
- As the first letter of a postal code,
- In Canada, J stands for the western and northern regions of Quebec.
- 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: |
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