For the programming language, see J programming language.

''J# will redirect here due to Naming_conventions_(technical_restrictions)#Characters not allowed at all in page titles. See J Sharp for it.

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 . In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ^* 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.

History

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J was originally a capital of I.

Petrus Ramus (d. 1572) was the first to make a distinction between I and J. Originally, both I and J were pronounced (see IPA) as , , and ; but Romance languages developed new sounds (from former and [g) that came to be represented as I and J; therefore, English J (from French J) has a sound quite different from I.

Other than English, the Germanic languages use J for the sound . This is true of Hungarian, Albanian, Finnish, and Estonian where it can never be a fricative. 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 "E" in Russian is sometimes transliterated "je" (with the "IO" becoming "jo" sometimes); the "YA" is transliterated as "ja"; and the character "YU" is transliterated "ju" - whereas the linguists from America and the English speaking world use "y" in place of "j" because it produces fewer mistakes there. European linguists also use this for the character J 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 , 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 (which in some cases developed from the sound, i.e. the same sound that English still represents orthographically by ). In French former is now pronounced as (as in English measure).

In Portuguese, Turkish, Azeri and Tatar J is always prounced .

Hebrew also influenced the English J, which in a few cases is used for 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.

Codes for computing

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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

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The minuscule letter j can refer to:

• The index variable after i
• The imaginary unit ($\backslash sqrt\{-1\}$), in fields such as physics and electrical engineering where i is traditionally used to denote a changing current

Special Uses in German

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In Germany, this letter is often written with a long serif on top, but only to the left of the character.

Regional meanings

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• 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;
• A justice (judge) on the Supreme Court of Canada would have his name written as "Smith J."
• On the New York City Subway system, J is a rapid transit service running from Downtown Manhattan to Jamaica.
• J is also used to denote Jayalalitha a Tamil actress, politician and chief minister of Tamil nadu
• J is also the name of a very well known Tamil artist Jeyaraj

• J is a German mintmark, which stands for the city of Hamburg.

Latin letters

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