history - If the letter J is only 400–500 years old, was there a J sound that preceded the design of the letter?


I understand that the letter "J" is relatively new — perhaps 400–500 years old. But since there has long been important names that begin with J, such as Jesus, Joshua, Justinian, etc., and which predate the introduction of a special letter, does that mean that the "J" sound predated the letter, or were such famous names spelled and pronounced differently?



Answer



The answer to this is.... complicated.


The letter J is, as you 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.


In the original languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew) which provide us with the names Jesus, Joseph, Justinian, etc., the sound which we write as J was pronounced as the English letter Y. (Just to make things confusing for English speakers, the phonetic symbol for this sound is [j].) In Latin, the letter for this was I/i, in Greek it was Ι/ι (iota), and in Hebrew it was י (yod). Thus, the Greek spelling for "Jesus" was Ιησους, pronounced something like "Yeh-SOOS", and the Latin likewise was Iesus.


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]. However, at about the same time there was a sound change in many of the languages of Western Europe, such that the "y" sound changed into a "j" sound ([dʒ], or sometimes [ʒ]). So we have it that in English, the letter J now represents a consonant [dʒ] which is not obviously similar to the vowel [i], despite the fact that they descend from the same letter and the same sound. (English also has many [dʒ] sounds spelled with J which come from native Germanic roots.)


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.


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