It's very rare, but the letter -J does exist in the Italian alphabet. Ask Question. Learn more. This habit continued even in the Letter j in roman zip Ages. I'll update the answer. We use these spellings in english words like 'ghost" and 'aghast' although the 'h' would not be used in Italian since the following vowel already makes the "g" hard.

I understand that the letter "J" is relatively new — perhaps — years old. But since there has long been important names that begin with J, such as Jesus, Joshua, Justinian, etc. The letter J is, as you Letter J In Roman Numerals Guide mentioned, relatively recent, and originated as a variant of the letter I.

Why that happens is a little complicated, and requires unpacking some assumptions in your question. Just to make things confusing for English speakers, the phonetic symbol for this sound is [j]. Subsequently, in the Latin alphabet the letter J was developed as a variant of I, and this distinction was later used to distinguish the consonantal "y" sound [j] from the vocalic "i" sound [i]. You can see this history worked out differently in the spelling systems of German and many of the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe, where the letter J spells the "y" sound [j], and the letter Y, if used at all, is primarily used as a vowel.

Classical Latin did not have a distinct J sound the J as we know in English. In the Middle Ages, a new letter was assigned to this sound - J. However, it can be seen from even a casual glance that there has been widespread confusion of this and related sounds in many Western European languages. We can see these when we compare Dutch or German cognates.

This outline only partially touches upon the question asked, but I hope throws some light on the evolution of the sounds around the letter J in a broader context. The quick answer is "yes" to both questions. Before j became differentiated from i, the "J" sound could be spelled with g in various combinations edge, gem, exaggerate, etc.

Transcribed from Hebrew, Jesus was Yeshua. The Romans would have spelled Justinian "Iustinianus. Just for fun - in Italian there is no "J" letter. The sound of that letter in English is represented by "ge" or "gi" as in Giovanni "jo von nee" in crude English phonetics. You also see this in "gelato" and it shows up in the English "gelatin" and its shorter form "gel".

See also "gemini", "gesture", "gentle", "gee whiz", "german", and lots more. Who needs a "j"? The 'g' in "go" and "gu" are pronounced as in English "hard" g. For a hard g sound followed by either "e" or "i", the Italians insert an 'h' between the 'g' and the following vowel.

We use these spellings in english words like 'ghost" and 'aghast' although the 'h' would not be used in Italian since the following vowel already makes the "g" hard. Along those same lines - in Italian the English sound of "ch" is represented along with its following vowel as "ci" or "ce". Similarly to 'g', inserting an 'h' between a 'c' and either 'e' or 'i' makes the 'c' "hard" - as does a following vowel of 'o' or 'u'. And again we use some of this same stuff in English - 'echo', 'charisma', 'chimera', etc.

I think most of those words in English come from Greek - just to confuse things - but the idea that a 'ch' is pronounced as 'ck' or just "hard c" is difficult for English speakers to accept until they see the same rule applied in English. I think that this letter has to do with the limitation of the alphabet that was used as the template. The original alphabet contained a character for the both the hard and soft "j" sounds.

Also the Georgian alphabet 33 letters created in the 4th century AD has a character for the hard "j" sound as in January and a character for the softer "j" sound as in a 'zh" as would be found in "Zha Zha Gabor". Since Georgian is not an Indo-European language while Armenian is an Indo-European language, one can come to the conclusion that the creation of the letter is dependent upon the needs of the language and not the language group.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? See these instructions from :. So you should interpret xvij as 17, not It's part of the number, not something appended. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 7 years, 5 months ago. Active 1 year, 7 months ago. Viewed 5k times. Is this a real phenomenon or just a coincidence? How widespread was the practice? Letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Letter J with diacritics. Precomposed Latin characters in Unicode Letters used in mathematics List of typographical symbols and punctuation marks.

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