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Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View PostWelsh would be a different number I think. Although J is being adopted in slowly.
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The letter J is, as you mentioned, relatively recent, and originated as a variant of the letter I. Why that happens is a little complicated, and requires unpacking some assumptions in your question.
In the original languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew) which provide us with the names Jesus, Joseph, Justinian, etc., the sound which we write as J was pronounced as the English letter Y. (Just to make things confusing for English speakers, the phonetic symbol for this sound is [j].) In Latin, the letter for this was I/i, in Greek it was Ι/ι (iota), and in Hebrew it was י (yod). Thus, the Greek spelling for "Jesus" was Ιησους, pronounced something like "Yeh-SOOS", and the Latin likewise was Iesus.
Subsequently, in the Latin alphabet the letter J was developed as a variant of I, and this distinction was later used to distinguish the consonantal "y" sound [j] from the vocalic "i" sound [i]. However, at about the same time there was a sound change in many of the languages of Western Europe, such that the "y" sound changed into a "j" sound ([dʒ], or sometimes [ʒ]). So we have it that in English, the letter J now represents a consonant [dʒ] which is not obviously similar to the vowel [i], despite the fact that they descend from the same letter and the same sound. (English also has many [dʒ] sounds spelled with J which come from native Germanic roots.)
You can see this history worked out differently in the spelling systems of German and many of the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe, where the letter J spells the "y" sound [j], and the letter Y, if used at all, is primarily used as a vowel
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Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View PostJust checked and it's 28 or 29 letters depending on who you ask. Which is pretty standard when it comes to questions about the Welsh language. (Always get a second opinion on translations, folks!)
A B C CH D DD E F FF G NG H I J L LL M N O P PH R RH S T TH U W Y
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- Oct 2011
- 26984
- Cambridgeshire
- Ipswich (convert)
- Those chocolate-coated ring-shaped ones you get at Christmas
I don't think it shows that you can - you need to add the 20+ hours from Beijing to the eastern cities to the 40+ hours it takes to get from Beijing to the western cities to get the the full width. So that's about 60 hours, non-stop, which is more like a week of driving I suppose.
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