GirlChat #730481
About a zillion years ago I asked you if you know any English word where the letter "j" is pronounced the same way as it is pronounced in many European languages, in other words like the English consonant y. You said you cannot remember any such word and said that it hardly exists.
The great majority of Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, use "j" for the palatal approximant /j/, which is usually represented by the letter "y" in English. Notable exceptions are English, Scots and (to a lesser degree) Luxembourgish. "j" also represents /j/ in Albanian, and those Uralic, Slavic and Baltic languages that use the Latin alphabet, such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Latvian and Lithuanian. Some related languages, such as Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, also adopted "j" into the Cyrillic alphabet for the same purpose. Because of this standard, the lower case letter was chosen to be used in the IPA as the phonetic symbol for the sound. There is at least one such English word: hallelujah. |