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Day: December 6, 2015

Why does the pronunciation of the letter ‘J’ vary so much throughout different languages?

By: | Post date: 2015-12-06 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Other Languages, Writing Systems

Because /j/ (English y) is a palatal phoneme, and palatals are historically unstable. (See for example Nick Nicholas’ answer to Linguistics: In Indo-European languages using a Latin alphabet, what’s up with these two letters “ch” that are pronounced (phonetics) so differently?) Rob Kerr’s answer is correct in principle, but the variation between German, English, French, […]