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J or j is the tenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual name in English is jay (pronounced / ˈ dʒ eɪ / ), with a now-uncommon variant jy / ˈ dʒ aɪ / .
Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to boustrophedon, then to left-to-right writing. Global distribution of the Cyrillic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main ...
The letters þ and ð are still used in present-day Icelandic (where they now represent two separate sounds, /θ/ and /ð/ having become phonemically-distinct – as indeed also happened in Modern English), while ð is still used in present-day Faroese (although only as a silent letter). Wynn disappeared from English around the 14th century ...
Such conventions were erratic for centuries. J was introduced into English for the consonant in the 17th century (being rare as a vowel), but it was not universally considered a distinct letter in the alphabetic order until the 19th century. The names of the letters were largely unchanged, with the exception of H.
For the Latin sounds represented by the various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet. Diacritics were not regularly used, but they did occur sometimes, the most common being the apex used to mark long vowels , which had previously sometimes been written doubled.
Of these letters, most were directly adopted from the Latin alphabet, two were modified Latin letters (Æ, Ð), and two developed from the runic alphabet (Ƿ, Þ). The letters Q and Z were essentially left unused outside of foreign names from Latin and Greek. The letter J had not yet come into use. The letter K was used by some writers but not ...
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Others, such as English, deviate from it to a much larger degree. [85] The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system. Writing systems have been borrowed for languages the orthography was not initially made to use. The degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies. [86]