What is the significance of the character "j" at the end of a Roman Numeral? (2013)
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I wish there were enough willpower for something similar for English, but it's probably too late to reach any sort of compromise on whether to use a "u" in words like "color"/"colour".
[1]: https://dutchreview.com/news/dutch-government-argue-over-spe...
For English, it's quite different because many countries list it as their official language but may have diverged spellings and meanings and there is no single body to direct the curriculum. The most notable is the US vs. British English and the u in colo(u)r is a mere spelling example. Consider surgery or elevator, which are bigger discrepancies. I remember from my school days, as a non-native speaker, these were much more troublesome and we had a special test just to check we could tell which is which in US and GB English.
The US doesn't have an official language, though most institutions operate primarily in English, and all US states that have one or more official languages include English on that list.
The US (i.e. the federal government) has no legal authority over education at all -- schools are run at the state level, and individual states often do have standard curricula.
I'm American and sometimes the only way I know that I'm using the GB spelling is when autocorrect flags it. Grey and defence are two just from the top of my head.
English has no "boss" in charge of how the language works and who decides what the correct anything for the language is. The closest are style guides, but they come from multiple organisations and each often different to each other. So, it's harder to just decide that something will be spelt differently.
Well, they like to pretend they have that kind of authority, those languages don't actually have a "boss" in charge of how the language works either.
IIRC, the French Academy has tried (and failed) to stamp out anglicisms like email (https://www.thoughtco.com/le-courriel-vocabulary-1371793) and weekend (https://www.lawlessfrench.com/tag/franglais/).
English had multiple attempted spelling reforms, but that mostly resulted in differences between American and British spellings of the same words. There was no central power to enforce a single English spelling because America had successfully broken off from the British Empire whose coercive force backed the English language.
In contrast, France was extremely good at putting down revolutionaries in their colonies. Even when they gained nominal independence France would invent debts to impoverish their former colonies. France was also extremely good at putting down local languages, even within France itself. France waged a century-long campaign to hunt its own minority languages to extinction[0] and the language regulators are themselves part of the same infrastructure.
In other words, "regular spelling" is a colonial atrocity and English's incomprehensible spelling rules are a demonstration of freedom.
This can even be demonstrated in each language's attitude towards loanwords. English stole huge swaths of Latin, Greek, and French vocabulary. Text even a few centuries old is difficult to read and anything older than Shakespeare is completely inscrutable[1] as there's too many Germanic root words for this ostensibly Germanic language. Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped.
Well, I suppose there is one reason why you'd want to stop it: loanwords make it far harder to regularize spelling. Think about, say, all the Japanese loanwords in English. Hepburn romanization[2] tried to make them readable to English speakers, but didn't do a great job, so now English has to accommodate spellings like karaoke, tsundere, or sakura alongside spellings like pleonasm, beef, or Olympic. Good luck inventing a spelling system that can both faithfully represent the "correct" sounds for all of those words, while also remaining legible to present English readers, and being adopted in every country that speaks English to some degree - off the top of my head that includes America, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, and South Africa.
[0] Which I suspect may have also inspired analogous atrocities in Canada against indigenous Canadians
[1] As I put it to a native Japanese speaker: "You can read Genji, I can't read Beowolf."
[2] Which itself isn't used by native speakers since you can't round-trip Hepburn to Romaji. Japan itself uses Kunrei-shiki romanization, it's the one that spells つ as tu instead of tsu.
That's something one hears quite often from English speakers but I don't really know where this myth comes from.
French is a quite decentralised language with each country having its own "regulator" but none of them have legal power. They are all just advisory organisations. Many the one with the most power is the OQLF in Québec. The French ministry of education decides what is taught in France and some of its reforms are sometimes followed by the other countries, but they don't deal with vocabulary itself, mostly orthography.
The Académie Française does invent words, but they have no official value or power. Their main occupation is documenting actual usage.
Most other European languages do have international, language wide regulators though, often with actual legal value, but French doesn't have anything like this.
I think it all comes down to English speakers knowing even less about the other languages than they know about French.
It’s updated in something called “The green book”, new versions got published in 1954 - 1995 - 2005 - 2015.
So for the people having learnt the language before 1995 (like myself), had the rules change 2.5 times (the last one was a minor actualisation). Which means that most of the intuitions you developed are wrong, and people spelling words differently depending on their age.
This was quite confusing for me as a kid haha
It would be like if Dutch and Afrikaans had to agree on spellings.
Which one would that be? AN which nobody actually uses (at least here in Flanders)?
I don't know much about how it works within the Netherlands but within Belgium at least the Dutch accent gives you no prestige at all. I would expect the reverse to be true in the Netherlands (whichever accent one would choose to represent the Flemish) since the Dutch sometimes don't even recognise Flemish speakers as native Dutch speakers and answer in English instead.
Afrikaans is a related but separate language. Suriname, as the third Dutch speaking country, does use the same spellings as Belgium and the Netherlands.
My understanding of Dutch is that Dutch media from Suriname to Belgium to NL uses the same prestige dialect. If you were to write a statement for a court, there is exactly one dialect that would be appropriate.
This is not true with English, where each major English speaking region teaches its own standard of English as the standard.
It's good to distinguish between Flemish as the group of dialects spoken in roughly the provinces of East- and West-Flanders, and Flemish as the broad name for everything that's not quite the standard language in the larger region of Flanders, which is the Dutch-speaking half of Belgium and includes three more provinces. I'm not sure which of those two those people refer to.
English tends to develop through evolution, not design. Whose willpower would we be talking about anyway?
And yes as a 7 year old Aussie it was interesting learning that the digram "ij" was the 25th letter on the Dutch alphabet
Daikstra - you can pronounce this
Dijkstra - a sound in between you cannot pronounce coming from English
Diekstra - you can pronounce this too
But the 'ɛi' is a dipthong, and we don't have that dipthong. We have aɪ, as in 'bride' /bɹaɪd/, which is what usually comes out, at least for those of us who know that /dʒɪkstɹə/ is not even close to right. What you'll hear is generally something like /daɪkstɹə/, which make sense, as we pronounce 'dike' /daɪk/ as well.
So yes, completely correct, I just wanted to add the IPA for clarity.
[0] The exceptions being dialects where it monophthongizes to /eː/
Phonemes are a funny thing: if an American were to pronounce that last name perfectly (or a Dutch person speaking English, for that matter), other Americans would still hear /daɪkstɹə/, or at most, "/daɪkstɹə/ but it sounds a bit foreign".
Some sounds which we don't produce are audibly not-English-phonemes, like German ü or Scandanavian ø, but others are not. Another example of this is that native English speakers aren't usually sensitive to the difference between the r sound in our word "pear" and the r sound in Spanish "pero", but recognize that "perro" is a different rhotic sound.
If I may ask purely out of curiosity, are you a native English speaker? I only say this because, to my American English ear, [eɪ] and [ɛi] are virtually indistinguishable. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you're trying to say....
I encourage you to listen to a native Dutch speaker pronounce Mynheer Dijkstra's name, which you can do on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra
Does that sound more like "dike" or more like "day"? To me (yes, native American English speaker, of one of the dialects very close to 'Standard'), it is obviously more like the former.
I might've figured out the disconnect. According to this image on Wikipedia[0], the Northern Standard Dutch realization of [ɛi] starts lower than the monophthongal [ɛ] in the same dialect[1]. Just speculation on my part, but maybe in the context of Dutch linguistics, [ɛi] conventionally signifies a wider diphthong than I would've naïvely thought? (If so, I guess this makes me a cautionary tale against directly comparing IPA transcriptions between languages....)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#/media/File:Du...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#/media/File:Du...
Dai = Day
Die = Die
If you make an "ay" sound, then transition to an "i" sound, you can feel that the sounds are continuous. So maybe that inbetween sound OP is talking about literally the sound you make with your tongue between "ay" and "i".
In cursive script, it's easy to see how "ij" becomes "ÿ". However, "ÿ"s Unicode codepoint of U+FF means it often shows up as a placeholder for "unrecognized character", doubling down the misapprehension that "ÿ" is the correct character in dutch text.
It is not pronounced like “bee see free glee me.”
The "j" instead of "i" prevents you from adding another 1 or 2 to the number, at most.
Meanwhile, you could still change "ii" to "vii" or "xii" or "lxii" or whatever on the left side.
And still often append "i" on the right side when it doesn't end in "j" -- "x" can still become "xj", "xij", "xvij", etc.
It's just funny that you'd bother at all with "j" when it achieves so little. I see that it was also a practice to draw a line over the number -- why not just draw a whole box around it?
Theory #2: It didn't start as such protection. It started as a typographical convention -- remember, there was a time when "i" and "j" weren't separate letters, "u" and "v" were not separate letters, and so on -- which then people started using as a reading guide.
Forgery doesn't make sense, yeah. You gave some reasons, but also western medieval and early modern conceptions of forgery, for instance, were very different than our modern one. Ease of reading and clarity makes sense.
Nothing in the answer (or anywhere in this thread) distinguishes "when". It don't doubt that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the "j" was used in this way, but that might not have always been the case.
This is why in legal documents you'll see things like "no more than twelve (12) months"
Edit: the source given by the article was from 1919, so it would have been within a couple of decades of the earlier laissez-faire drug policy.
Other ligatures like tz and ch did not survive the jump into Roman letterforms, only ß for some reason.
By the way the now obsolete dual letterforms of s (ſ/s) was inherited from Greek. We’re lucky it was still in use in Leibniz’s time or calculus notation would be more confusing!
The ß sticks around in German because it prevents some ambiguities. For example Busse and Buße are different words with different pronunciations.
Basically German orthography backed itself into a corner because of two rules: a vowel before a doubled consonant is short, and an s before a vowel is pronounced /z/. This leaves you with no clear way to write a long vowel followed by an /s/ sound followed by a vowel: VssV would make the first vowel short, and VsV would keep the first vowel long but the consonant would be pronounced as /z/. The ß solves this problem.
Just for completeness, there _is_ a capital ß: ẞ
Some German. I believe it’s basically abandoned in Swiss German.
It is literally a ligature of the long s and z. This is unsurprisingly obvious in Fraktur, given the name, but you can see it in the Roman form ß: the upper concavity of ‚s‘ opens to the right while the upper concavity of ‚z‘ opens to the left (the bottom of Fraktur Z in both cases had/has a tail like g which is how you get the bottom part of the shape).
I still have a few books printed in Fraktur — each time I pick one up (which is not frequently!) it’s is very hard to read at first, but after a few pages goes back to being easy. Since this phenomenon takes a little “priming” it’s annoying to encounter a sentence or phrase of Fraktur on a shop sign or other short, random location.
Another commenter linked to an explanation of why a vowel shift caused “sz” to reflect “ss”. The character form and name are fossils (something I wish German retained more of — it’s one of the things I love about English).
This might help: https://thelanguagecloset.com/2022/11/05/the-story-of-eszett...
In short, it codifies a pronunciation that existed before a phonetic shift. The transliteration was codified after that same shift.
The original off-by-one error?
J and I are thus equivalent.
There is a similar history between U and V. The original latin alphabet just had V. U covers the case where V is a vowel. That is why in old carvings and statues they sometimes write U as V.
Why isn’t “june” then “iune”?
> U covers the case where V is a vowel
Why is “quit” not “qvit”? Because isn’t a “u” following a “q” always a non-vowel (constant)?
https://www.ck12.org/spelling/u-a-vowel-that-can-act-as-a-co....
But if you've seen middle and early modern English text that hasn't been sanitized for modern readers, you will see a lot of stuff. You'll see W written as uu. You'll see lots of Vs and Us trading places, in places we no longer put them.
And eg. I kind of suspect the UK pronunciation of lieutenant, where u is /f/, has roots in it being /v/.
It says that in French of the time as heard by English people at the time, the phonetic value of that u was ambiguously heard as f or v.
My position is v and u were phonetically ambiguous or sometimes heard as the same in Latin and romance languages. Maybe also in older forms of English.
The change in the pronunciation is just centuries' worth of language evolution.
[1]: https://content.9news.com/photo/2016/08/26/citycounty2_denve...
I'm not certain about the etymology, but many languages do use an "i" sound for the names of June and July. I wouldn't be surprised if it started with an "i", then people switched to writing it with a "j" while still using the same sound, and then later people began pronouncing it differently.
Because it’s not Latin? Things change quite a lot as centuries pass. But it could have been different, like in German, in which Juni (=June) is pronounced /iuni/.
What you describe as y is /j/ in IPA.
What you describe as zh is /ʒ/.
Spanish j is usually /x/. Some languages transcribe /x/ as kh or ch. There are accents of Spanish that pronounce it as /h/ or something slightly different however.
In Latin, June would indeed have been IVNIVS.
(Furthermore, if you have additional syntax on it like a superscript th, why is the j still needed then. That's a pure onion in the varnish at that point; someone just using the j without thinking about its purpose and necessity.)
Ley, rey, etc.
Edit: on the other hand, x used to be read /j/ (e.g. Quixote, Mexico), so also possibly lex —> lej —> ley
No, in fact they descend from the accusative forms, lēgem and rēgem. I don’t know much about the precise evolution, but g → y strikes me as a perfectly normal sound change, especially before /e/. Looks like it happened in the other Romance languages too: compare French roi, Portuguese rei, Italian re, etc.
Compare "Dag" (low German)"; Saterland Frisian "Dai"; West Frisian "dei"; "dag" in Old Saxon, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish); Faroese and Icelandic "dagur"; Gothic "dags"
d -> t is one of the major High German consonant shifts. Other examples of the d -> t shift is Vater vs. vader, fader, father (from Middle English "fader", so there the "th" in modern English is also not from the German)
Others prominent changes around the same time included e.g. p -> ff (Schiff vs. ship, schip, ship, skip, skib in other Germanic languages) and /t/ -> /t:s/ etc. - compare Zwei with two, to, två in other Germanic languages.
Very few of those changes made it into English, either Old English at the time, or later - English in that respect tends to be closer to Low German than to current standard German.
(as an English speaker - or a speaker of basically any other Germanic language -, to learn German having a rough idea about the consonant shift is a major help in figuring out German vocabulary - you'll find a lot more German words are "close enough" to be understandable once you recognise the changed sounds)
The softening of the "g" into "y", "j","i" is also a feature in other Germanic languages for many other words. E.g. in modern Norwegian "deg" (the object form of "you" / "thee" which is necessary in Norwegian still) can be pronounced both with a very pronounced g, and with a tiny shift of the tongue to soften it into a i/j. In English we have "dough" where the "g" has disappeared, but was still there in Old English, and where in modern Norwegian you again can choose /dɛɪːɡ/ or /dæɪ̯/. They all, again, share a root in Germanic with the German, where we again have a strong indication the other Germanic languages evolved their current versions from Germanic rather than German in that the German got a "t" from the consonant shift: "Teig" (vs Low German "Deeg")
Is it? Aren't the descendants of the ablative mostly -amante adverbs and e.g. conmigo? The wiki article of Ablative Case doesn't even mention Spanish.
Got any other examples of ablative in Spanish?
In the case of Mexico they were transcribing a word from indigenous people.
In a bunch of Spanish words coming from Latin, it was often from Latin double S. Eg. páxaro, from Vulgar Latin passarum. I can also think of cases of this sound coming from Arabic, eg. modern ojalá was once oxala which is a cognate with "inshallah", note the sh sound.
Sometime around the 1500s this sound changed to /x/ and they changed spellings of a few different sounds whose values had shifted over the centuries. X had merged with a sound they spelled with J, derived from Latin words with J in them.
> Alternatively, the letter J may have developed as a swash form of i. In other European languages it was first used for the final i in Roman numerals when there was more than one i in a row, such as iij for "three", to prevent the fraudulent addition of an extra i to change the number. In Dutch, which had a native ii, the "final i in a row elongated" rule was applied as well, leading to ij.
> Another theory is that IJ might have arisen from the lowercase y being split into two strokes in handwriting. At some time in the 15th or 16th century, this combination began to be spelled as a ligature ij. An argument against this theory is that even in handwriting which does not join letters, ij is often written as a single sign.
So indeed maybe the same as the Roman numerals. Interesting, I didn't know this. (Also interesting that no one really knows where this letter came from.)
It is used in that way in French too.
I guess in other languages than Dutch it could be a y with a diaeresis or umlaut.
Wikipedia on Spanish phonology notes the difference in pronunciation between viuda and ayuda which is an interesting contrast in two very similar sounding words.
Old Spanish had a lot of phonological differences so I'm not sure you can do a straight comparison.
I own an anotated Lazarillo book for modern Spanish readers, btw. It will describe you every ancient jargon and old sayings as footnotes. And, of course, some of the context.
The j was to prevent forgery, or altering the document. ii could be altered later to iii.. but if it was ij its obvious its been tampered with if it later appears as iji
So please don't trust comments that just say "ChatGPT told me..."
Oh, is that where "dot the i's and cross the t's" comes from? I can imagine that saying being hammered into many medical practitioners back then.
Hence dotting is and crossing ts is going back to do final touches that you've neglected or may have missed while working quickly or casually.
If the doctor prescribes 10 tablets, the user could be tempted to add a zero and thus get 100 tablets instead of 10. It's more difficult to turn an X into a C.
«… and it is customary to draw a line above all the letters making up the number, the dots of i and j being put above this line; for example, xviij»
_____
XVIII
-----
So, if the script had X written that way, adding a C, would have also required both lines to be extended. Not impossible to forge, but an extra effort nevertheless.
It might differ by location, but here (I'm in the UK), it's not unusual to e.g. get 14 pills of antibiotics if prescribed a two week course even if the package is in units of 10, for example.
Matching packaging sizes is not necessary - I have had prescriptions that do not match packaging sizes many times - they will cut up sheets or transfer to other containers as needed.
I can't find anything to suggest EU rules prevents split packs - I do see there was a tightening of the rules on how to treat packs if dispensing split backs a few years ago, but nothing since. Do you have a source?
EDIT: At least as late as per the False Medicines Directive going into force in 2019, split pack dispensing was explicitly allowed - the FMD set out rules for the controls required to do so. E.g. the original container can not leave the dispensary until its entire content is used, and the pharmacy can't re-sell or supply other pharmacies with it.
It seems that prescription drugs were established in 1938 in US and in 1946 in UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durham%E2%80%93Humphrey_Amendm...
I think this way it is difficult to add more Roman digits like x to fake a higher amount than prescribed.
The letter j seems to be an additional security because i as a letter is narrow and one could perhaps squash in one or two more i's. The instruction also mentions that the number of dots is important, if the number of i and j is not the same as the number of dots above the line, the apothecary should assume an error.
The paragraph you mention seems to worry more about mistakes more than tempering attempts though (taking 10x the dose prescribed could indeed be problematic)
I regularly see verbiage like "person A promises to pay person B 100 (in words, one hundred) zloty upon termination of this contract."
It's just difficult, but not impossible.
This said, such tampering is in my jurisdiction punishable by law (Art. 251 Forgery of a document), see https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/54/757_781_799/en#art_251
I am sure in Common Law jurisdiction forgery of documents is also punishable.
So such things are defended by a two-pronged approach: Make it difficult and forbid it.
A horizontal square bracket would have been a more effective deterrent than just a line.
scnr
Yeah I imagined this was the case. Same as other common ways to avoid misunderstanding (and possible forgeries)
...on that note, how would one write complex numbers in Roman numerals, now that both i and j are taken?
__
√–I