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A long /iː/ usually in the middle or end of words. In this case it has no diacritic, but could be marked with a kasra in the preceding letter in some traditions. A long /eː/ In many dialects, as a result of the monophthongization that the diphthong /aj/ underwent in most words. A part of a diphthong, /aj/. Then, it has no diacritic but could ...
Middle English scribes began to use i (later j ) to represent word-initial /dʒ/ under the influence of Old French, which had a similarly pronounced phoneme deriving from Latin /j/ (for example, iest and later jest), while the same sound in other positions could be spelled as dg (for example, hedge). [7]
In Middle English, it also stood for the phoneme /x/ and its allophone [ç] as in niȝt ("night", in an early Middle English way still often pronounced as spelled so: [niçt]), and also represented the phonemes /j/ and /dʒ/. Sometimes, yogh stood for /j/ or /w/, as in the word ȝoȝelinge [ˈjowəlɪŋɡə], "yowling".
In the writing systems used for most languages in Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe, the letter j denotes the palatal approximant, as in German Jahr 'year', which is followed by IPA. Although it may be seen as counterintuitive for English-speakers, there are a few words with that orthographical spelling in certain loanwords in English like ...
In Norwegian and Swedish gj represents /j/ in words like gjorde ('did'). In Faroese, it represents /dʒ/. It is also used in the Romanization of Macedonian as a Latin equivalent of Cyrillic Ѓ . Also, it's used in Friulian to represent /ɟ/ (whilst /dʒ/ is one of the pronunciations of the letter z ).
The Middle English initial cluster /ɡn/ is reduced to /n/ in Modern English. Like the reduction of /kn/, this seems to have taken place during the seventeenth century. [25] The change affected words like gnat, gnostic, gnome, etc., the spelling with gn-being retained despite the loss of the /ɡ/ sound.
Although the Old English diphthongs merged into monophthongs, Middle English began to develop a new set of diphthongs.Many of these came about through vocalization of the palatal approximant /j/ (usually from an earlier /ʝ/) or the labio-velar approximant /w/ (sometimes from an earlier voiced velar fricative [ɣ]), when they followed a vowel.
The letter j has only recently [when?] been accepted into Welsh orthography: for use in words borrowed from English which retain the /dʒ/ sound, even when it originally was not represented by j in English orthography, as in garej ("garage"), jiráff (“giraffe”), and ffrij ("fridge").