It wasn’t until 1524 when Gian Giorgio Trissino, an Italian Renaissance grammarian known as the father of the letter J, made a clear distinction between the two sounds. How did J get its sound?īoth I and J were used interchangeably by scribes to express the sound of both the vowel and the consonant. Originally a Phoenician pictogram representing a leg with a hand, and denoting a sound similar to the Y in “yes,” I was later adopted by Semitic groups to describe the word “arm” which, in Semitic languages, began with a J (also possessing the same Y sound as in “yes”). J’s phonetic quest for independence probably began with the sound of the letter I. (A story for another day: the name of the dot over the “j” and “i,” and why we use them.) Are J and I related? With the introduction of lowercase letters to the Roman numeric system, J was commonly used to denote the conclusion of a series of ones-as in “xiij” for the number 13. The letter J began as a swash, a typographical embellishment for the already existing I.
It is no coincidence that I and J stand side by side-they actually started out as the same character. J is a bit of a late bloomer after all, it was the last letter added to the alphabet. From its humble beginnings as a Roman numeral to its eventual tenth position in the English alphabet, J has had quite a linguistic journey.
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