Trivia regarding the letter "J"

The letter "J" (and the sound it represents) was the last letter (and sound) to be recognized, and it did not exist in any Indo-European derived language (and perhaps even in others) until 1524 when per Wikepedia: 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.

In 1611 when the King James Bible was first published there still was no letter "J" in the English language, and in the original KJV Jesus was called Iesus. The letter "J" did not appear in the English language until 1634. It still does not exist in Hebrew.

http://www.everlastingkingdom.info/article/255/

More food for thought: If there was no "J", then just who was this "King _ames" who commissioned and authorized the first K_V Bible, if there was of quite high certainty no "J" in his name or his Bible?

lsayre wrote:More food for thought: If there was no "J", then just who was this "King _ames" who commissioned and authorized the first K_V Bible, if there was of quite high certainty no "J" in his name or his Bible?

Obama would know.

Like you said, it was probably King Iames V Bible.

The "J" was probably there it was just pronounced as an "I".

Since we're on the subject of the alphabet or written language or hell language itself who came up with it in the first place?

Someone obviously had to of sat down and said, 'Now, that we have an alphabet, this is what it is.'

But it was probably more like squiggly lines and a series of dots or something. I've often wondered where it originated prior to the first documented time an alphabet/any alphabet or any language was invented. How did we move from grunts to spoken word. It's all very perplexing.

Infants are genetically predisposed to learn language, so I would think that behavior goes way way back. Homo Erectus is generally accepted as a direct ancestor so over a million years. Your guess is as good as mine. Those who are expert in the field study the palate area of fossils to determine if speech was possible or at least a modern range of sound. Since almost any animal makes sounds and those sounds can have meaning then language moves a lot further back though with a severely limited vocabulary. How old is a scream from fright?

Words and meanings and spelling become accepted through usage. The same language can sound very different in different regions. There is the story of a couple of Londoners who went upriver 20 or 30 miles and asked a woman to sell them some provisions. She answered that she was sorry but she did not understand Latin. they were both speaking English.

Good readable books are by Mario Pei and Bill Bryson which you can find on Amazon.