J
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other uses, see J (disambiguation). J# redirects here for technical reasons; see J Sharp.
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The letter J is the tenth letter in the Latin alphabet; it was the last to be added to that alphabet. Its name in English is jay /dʒeɪ/.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [j] represents the palatal approximant. It is also the only letter not to appear in the Periodic Table. On alphanumeric keyboards using the QWERTY layout, the F and J keys generally have a raised bar (perceptible to the touch) over them to assist in touch typing. All other keys can be found with their relative positions around these two keys as the index finger is generally used to type the F and the J.
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[edit] History
J was originally an alternate version of I.
Petrus Ramus (d. 1572) was the first to distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds. Originally, both I and J represented /i/, /iː/, 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 value quite different from /i/.
All the Germanic languages except English use J for /j/. This is also true of Hungarian, Albanian, Finnish, and Estonian. Further, those Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet (or adopted J into the Cyrillic, as in Serbian) use this letter for the same purpose. Because of this standard, the minuscule letter was chosen by IPA as the phonetic symbol for the sound.
Linguists from Germany and Central Europe also took up this letter in transliterations from those Slavic languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet. Specifically, the "Е" in Russian is sometimes transliterated "je" (with the "Ё" becoming "jo"); the "Я" is transliterated as "ja"; and the character "Ю" is transliterated "ju" - whereas the linguists from America and the English speaking world use "y" in place of "j" because of English and Spanish use of Y for /j/. European linguists also use this for the character Й so that their transliterations of nominative case of adjectives ("-IJ") end in "-ij" whereas in American transliterations it's "-ii". The student who uses the American transliteration has to remember that the second "i" is different from the first in the original.
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). The Italian Novelist Luigi Pirandello utilised J in vowels group in his works.
In Spanish J stands for /x ~ h/ (which developed from an earlier /ʒ/; the actual phonetic realization depends on dialect). In French former /dʒ/ is now pronounced as /ʒ/ (as in English measure).
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In Portuguese, Romanian, Turkish, Azeri and Tatar J always represents /ʒ/.
Hebrew also influenced the English J, which in a few cases is used for /j/ in place of the more normal Y. The classic example is Hallelujah which is pronounced the same as "Halleluyah. See the Hebrew yodh for more details.
J is not used too frequently in the English Language but it's more common than Q, X or Z
[edit] Codes for computing
| NATO phonetic | Morse code | ||
| Juliett | |||
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| Signal flag | Semaphore | ASL Manual | Braille |
In Unicode the capital J is codepoint U+004A and the lowercase j is U+006A. Unicode also has a dotless variant, ȷ (U+0237) for use with combining diacritics.
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.
[edit] Meanings for J
- In astronomy,
- J stands for Jupiter, as in S/2003 J 18, the eighteenth natural satellite of Jupiter discovered in 2003.
- J is a provisional designation prefix for any comet, asteroid, or minor planet discovered between May 1 and 15 of a year.
- In mathematics, the minuscule letter j can refer to
- The index variable after i
- The imaginary unit (
), in fields such as physics and electrical engineering where i is traditionally used to denote a changing current - The second imaginary unit of a quaternion
- In physics,
- In radio,
- the NATO J band ranges from 10 to 20 GHz.
- In popular culture,
J can also mean "joke", as in Goran Vlacic is a huge J.
[edit] Special Uses in German and Swedish
In Germany and Sweden, this letter is often written with a long serif on top, but only to the left of the character.
[edit] Regional meanings
- The international license plate code for Japan;
- As the first letter of a postal code in Canada, J is used for the western and northern regions of Quebec;
- On the New York City Subway system, J is a rapid transit service running from Downtown Manhattan to Jamaica.
- J is a German mintmark, which stands for the city of Hamburg.
- J is often pronounced in the United Kingdom as "jye". Especialy in Scotland and Ireland.
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