<P> The letter J originated as a swash letter I, used for the letter I at the end of Roman numerals when following another I, as in XXIIJ or xxiij instead of XXIII or xxiii for the Roman numeral representing 23 . A distinctive usage emerged in Middle High German . Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478--1550) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana ("Trissino's epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language") of 1524 . Originally,' I' and' J' were different shapes for the same letter, both equally representing / i /, / iː /, and / j /; but, Romance languages developed new sounds (from former / j / and / ɡ /) that came to be represented as' I' and' J'; therefore, English J, acquired from the French J, has a sound value quite different from / j / (which represents the initial sound in the English word "yet"). </P> <P> In English, ⟨ j ⟩ most commonly represents the affricate / dʒ / . In Old English, the phoneme / dʒ / was represented orthographically with ⟨ cg ⟩ and ⟨ cȝ ⟩ . Under the influence of Old French, which had a similar phoneme deriving from Latin / j /, English scribes began to use ⟨ i ⟩ (later ⟨ j ⟩) to represent word - initial / dʒ / in Old English (for example, iest and, later jest), while using ⟨ dg ⟩ elsewhere (for example, hedge). Later, many other uses of ⟨ i ⟩ (later ⟨ j ⟩) were added in loanwords from French and other languages (e.g. adjoin, junta). The first English language book to make a clear distinction between ⟨ i ⟩ and ⟨ j ⟩ was published in 1633 . In loan words such as raj, ⟨ j ⟩ may represent / ʒ / . In some of these, including raj, Azerbaijan, Taj Mahal, and Beijing, the regular pronunciation / dʒ / is actually closer to the native pronunciation, making the use of / ʒ / an instance of a hyperforeignism . Occasionally, ⟨ j ⟩ represents the original / j / sound, as in Hallelujah and fjord (see Yodh for details). In words of Spanish origin, where ⟨ j ⟩ represents the voiceless velar fricative (x) (such as jalapeño), English speakers usually approximate with the voiceless glottal fricative / h / . </P> <P> In English, ⟨ j ⟩ is the fourth least frequently used letter in words, being more frequent only than ⟨ z ⟩, ⟨ q ⟩, and ⟨ x ⟩ . It is, however, quite common in proper nouns, especially personal names . </P> <P> 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 . </P>

When did the letter j enter the alphabet