10th letter of the English alphabet, pronounced "jay," as in "kay" for
-k-
, but formerly written out as
jy
, rhyming with
-i-
and corresponding to French
ji
.
One of the most stable English letters (it has almost always the same sound), it is a latecomer to the alphabet and originally had no sound value. The letter itself began as a scribal modification of Roman
-i-
in continental Medieval Latin. The scribes added a "hook" to small
-i-
, especially in the final position in a word or roman numeral, to distinguish it from the strokes of other letters. The dot on the
-i-
(and thus the
-j-
) and the capitalization of the pronoun
I
are other solutions to the same problems.
In English,
-j-
was used as a roman numeral throughout Middle English, but the letter
-y-
was used to spell words ending an "i" sound, so
-j-
was not needed to represent a sound. Instead, it was introduced into English c. 1600-1640 to take up the consonantal sound that had evolved from the Roman
i-
since Late Latin times. In Italian,
g-
was used to represent this, but in other languages
j-
took the job. This usage is attested earliest in Spanish, where it was in place before 1600.
No word beginning with J is of Old English derivation. [OED]
English dictionaries did not distinguish words beginning in
-i-
and
-j-
until 19c., and
-j-
formerly was skipped when letters were used to express serial order.
In Latin texts printed in modern times,
-j-
often is used to represent Latin
-i-
before
-a-
,
-e-
,
-o-
,
-u-
in the same syllable, which in Latin was sounded as the consonant in Modern English
you
,
yam
, etc., but the custom has been controversial among Latinists:
The character
J
,
j
, which represents the letter sound in some school-books, is an invention of the seventeenth century, and is not found in MSS., nor in the best texts of the Latin authors. [Lewis]
In English words from Hebrew,
-j-
represents
yodh
, which was equivalent to English consonantal
y
(hence
hallelujah
) but many of the Hebrew names later were conformed in sound to the modern
-j-
(compare
Jesus
).