[Home]History of J

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Revision 4 . . (edit) September 5, 2001 12:55 am by (logged).180.71.xxx
Revision 3 . . May 21, 2001 12:40 pm by TedDunning
Revision 2 . . (edit) May 21, 2001 8:52 am by (logged).249.141.xxx
  

Difference (from prior major revision) (minor diff, author diff)

Changed: 1c1
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 non-official 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 has a sound quite different from I. In other Germanic languages, J stands for /j/, in Italian, only foreign words have J; 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).
The tenth letter of the latin alphabet 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 non-official 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 has a sound quite different from I. In other Germanic? languages, J stands for /j/, in Italian, only foreign words have J; 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 /ZH/ (as in English MEASURE).

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