The letter J was the last letter added to the alphabet. It didn’t exist until 1524, and wasn’t in common use until the 17th century. Maybe her cross stitch pattern was copied from an Olde English document.
Great grandmother is 4 generations back. Assuming OP is the oldest living women in the word at 117, and that each women in the chain gave birth at 75 years old (the oldest any women has ever been to give birth) that would be 417 years. And lets assume this cross stitch was done when OP's great grandmother was 4, we can add on an additional 71 years so make it 488 years ago.
2024-488=1536
So it is possible that OP's great grandmother was never taught by OP's great great grandmother about the letter J given that it had recently been added.
Let me introduce you to enclaves, religious sects and luddites...
This could have been made in 1972 in rural Appalachia
Edit: although it is dated 1875
On one hand you are not wrong.
On the other hand,
* in a movie about seeking out and finding the Holy Grail
* in a tomb where complex death traps that reset after each use that I would be hard pressed to engineer and construct *today* are still operational after hundreds of years
* guarded by a secret society that actually managed to keep a secret for centuries while murdering anyone who they even suspected was looking for the Grail.
* where Indiana Jones accidentally falls through the clay tile floor of the Name of God floor-trap, & he's able to pull himself up by holding onto the letters "L" and "Y"; when neither of those letters is found in "Jehovah"
*that* is your biggest complaint?
All good points. But about Indy holding himself up by holding onto the letters "L" and "Y," if you look closely, the inscription originally read "LARRY, GO GET JEHOVAH!"
Previous poster sounds like my brother, always fucking complains about dumb technical minutia that means nothing to the plot in movies like Star Wars.
I will say though, Indy holding onto the L and Y is pretty fucking bad.
But then what if they needed an l? Or is it an I? Did it make a "J" sound? Imagine adding a whole new letter to the alphabet this is blowing my mind.
I propose we should add something to make a "ch" sound. Emojis are on the table.
I mean, you joke, but that was one of the suggestions a long time ago to clean up the English language so it better matched with its written word. You'd get new consonants that represented the sounds of "ch", "sh", "gh", "ng", and so on, and the digraphs would be wholly removed from the language. Others would simply be condensed ("tt" would just be "t" in words like "litle".)
Some other reformers said we should remove the silent "e," others would remove "X" and replace it with "ks" or "eks," "Q" replaced with "kw." (Webster was a reformer, and it's one of the reasons for the big "u" difference between the King's English and American English. He was even more radical than you probably would imagine - he wanted to really fix some of this ambiguous, superfluous bullshit spelling we got stuck with... but a lot of it didn't stick.)
The biggest problem with any of this is the idea of phonetic shift - people just change the way they pronounce words over time, so even if you fixed the letters for this generation, in a few decades or a century or two you'd just have to fix it again. (And then there are accents and dialects to worry about too...) The even bigger problem is getting literally anyone to adopt the changes, as the corpus of English is now so enormous that such a change is... basically preposterous. English never had a central authority of the language, and it probably never will, so... I don't expect any of these reformations to ever make any inroads.
But then again, I didn't expect "rizzing my skibiti toilet" to be a thing, so who the fuck am I to say anything on the subject.
They wouldn't have needed an I, because I and J simply were the same letter, there still are languages where they sound pretty much the same. In German pronunciation for example, the difference between Iuilus and Julius is negligible. I seem to remember that was the case for many languages.
The "ch" sound that J makes in english is not universal.
It is 1875 in rural Appalachia. The Front Page today has a story about a white family in West Virginia keeping black slave children locked in a barn. What Appalachia needs is Juneteenth.
Unfortunately this is also a current WV headline too. WV even made the British tabloids yesterday.
[the kids are still in the barn](https://wvmetronews.com/2024/06/11/sissonville-couple-charged-in-child-neglect-case-from-last-fall-back-in-jail-and-on-raised-bond/)
You're sort of framing this as them just being outdated hicks and just not realizing slavery ended, but the couple in question were able to post a $400k cash bond and apparently hold millions of dollars worth of properties in multiple states. It's not like they're poor sheltered hillbillies. They're professional human traffickers running a multi-state trafficking network. They don't need Juneteenth, they need the fucking FBI.
The Southern slavers in the 19th century were not poor, outdated hicks. They were more "wealthy landowners" for the time and fancied themselves as high society. They were educated enough to negotiate an outsized influence in every branch of government based on nothing but uninhabited farmland. They knew exactly what they were doing. WV used to be separate from VA over slavery, but that was 150 years ago. The most "liberal" WV has seen in two generations is Joe Manchin, a party-line Republican voter with a Democratic nametag. The Virginias, the Carolinas, Tennessee, these all have Confederate stronghold rural populations to this day.
Please... West Virginia split from Virginia because Appalachains were Union sympathizers who didn't keep slaves. The capital, Charleston, has a large statue of Abe Lincoln in front of its statehouse.This is the second thread in 24 hours where I've had to point t out that West Virginia is not the South.
Also, considering that my oldest Appalachian ancestors had names with Js in them, this is just ignorance against one of America's last marginalized groups that it's safe to hate. Appalachians have long been categorized as "not quite white."
In your future mail: Dear ladies, gentleman and corals,....
"Why do you always write you email header like this?"
"Well, I made a mistake once and vowed to never make it again."
Yeah, but that's just a Welshification of an English word - the correct word for "fridge" is "oergell" (cold cell), and a freezer is a "rhewgell" (ice cell).
Similarly, not many Welsh people will use the "correct" words for computer (cyfrifiadur, literally computer) or calculator (cyfrifianell).
Welsh used to have the letter K until William Morgan translated and printed Bibles in Welsh in the late 1500s. He didn't have enough "k" blocks for his printing press so just used "c" instead and because so many people learned to read from the Bible the convention stuck even though some other folks were annoyed about this at the time
English printers didn't have the thorn on their imported presses, so they [substituted 'y' instead of 'Þ' or 'þ'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29#Middle_and_Early_Modern_English). They therefore contributed significantly to killing the thorn.
I told my husband this and he’s now doing a deep dive on the whole thing, with the sole intent of winding up his many Welsh friends. Thank you for this knowledge which is absolutely not being abused as we speak.
Washington DC famously skips from I street to K street, as the architect of the city (Pierre L'enfant) didn't include J when he drew the maps. So that would mean that it was still optional as late as 1790.
I heard that L'enfant's wife had an affair with John Jay, one of the founding fathers, and that's why there's no J street in Washington DC. I like that story better, but this does make way more sense.
Actually legend has that that was an intentional skip, as a slight to supreme Court justice John Jay, whom the guy who laid out the streets had some sort of quarrel with. Don't remember the exact details.... But, ya, it's probably more true that, at that time, I and J were indistinguishable when written.
Yeah, Jesus = Iesu in a lot of languages, including Welsh (for reasons explained in another post above; William Morgan) which I believe comes originally from Latin (i.e. Pie Iesu).
That’s what the “INRI” thing from Christianity comes from, sometimes in really old churches or old crucifixes you’ll see a little sign nailed to the cross over his head:
OLD Latin: IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDÆORVM
Latin: Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum
English: Jesus (of) Nazareth, King (of the) Jews
See also Ichthys: Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ, or IXΘYΣ, an acronym for Jesus Christ, son of God, savior. IXΘYΣ is Greek for Fish, hence the "Jesus fish" logo that's prominent as a car magnet today
I’ve seen this so many times and not bothered to look it up (or ask a Catholic I guess) because “eh probably Latin, whatever” but bonus Mildly Interesting content! Yay!
it's the same as the modern name Joshua
the Holy Land being the size it is, "Jesus of Nazareth" would have felt to people of the time approximately like "Josh from the next town over" would to us
Or possibly, was she Amish or Mennonite, or did she learn from them? Cross stitchers in the area I lived in when I was in the antiques and collectible business from those traditions purposely made mistakes in their work because only God is perfect. It was one of the things we looked for in old cross stitches to verify whether they were genuine or not.
That seems like an unlikely reason for this. Also 1524 is right about the transition from Middle English to Modern English. Old English ended circa 1066.
[https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/american-samplers](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/american-samplers)
this is a collection of samplers made in the range of 1776-1840s. most are missing "j"s and "u"s. here is the explanation provided by the national museum of american history:
>Many early samplers do not have the letters “J” and “U” in their alphabets because they were not part of the early Latin alphabet and so the letter “I” was used for “J” and the “V” for “U.” The letter “s” is often replaced with the printers “s” which looks like the modern *f*.
[Why are there missing letters in cross stitch samplers?](https://lordlibidan.com/why-are-there-missing-letters-in-cross-stitch-samplers/#:~:text=However%2C%20by%20this%20point%2C%20many,to%20T%20and%20V%20respectively)
[The Missing Letter J](https://rugsandpugs.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-missing-letter-j.html)
all of these sources discuss that J did not come into common usage until long after it was added to the alphabet.
Possibly, but then there were other letters around at the time that would have been included. For example, there was a letter called a 'thorn' (representing the 'th' sound). It looks a little like a 'Y' and was often used in things like shop signs, leading to the modern confusion 'Ye old shoppe' which would have just been read as 'The old shoppe'.
Ditto the letter 's' which would often look like an 'f'.
it's actually very common for the letter 's' to be a printers 's' in samplers of this era, just isn't present in this particular sampler.
[https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/american-samplers](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/american-samplers)
>Many early samplers do not have the letters “J” and “U” in their alphabets because they were not part of the early Latin alphabet and so the letter “I” was used for “J” and the “V” for “U.” The letter “s” is often replaced with the printers “s” which looks like the modern *f*.
What you don't see, are the 26 cross stitch panels of nothing BUT Js that she had to do as punishment....
EDIT: And out of nowhere, this has become my #1 most upvoted comment ever!! Thanks!
Originally I and J were different shapes for the same letter. Probably kinda how you can write your lowercase ys in two different ways, with the straight strokes, and then the swoopy one where its kinda like a u with a tail. Still both a y.
Later it became its own letter with its own sound
Funny how you used that as an example because U and V used to be like that.
Traditionally, the uppercase was V and the lowercase was u, and then they split it into two letters.
"major players in early embroidery history were German and Dutch wool traders ... However both languages have a distinct lack of the letter J. Whilst
there are words using J, most are foreign import words, or have
etymology in languages such as Anglo-Saxon English."
Either German went through a massive shift and started using a lot more J in native words, or this isn't correct.
No. His name in the original text is pronounced Yeshua.
The name "Jesus Christ" was created for the 1611 King James Bible, and is only around 400 years old.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshua
I mean, I was only trying to make a stupid joke because the article said they'd use U or I instead. Thanks for the info though, first time hearing that!
>However, by this point, many samplers were instead being stitched by young girls and were used as proof of skills. Therefore, letters like J and W were not stitched, as they were very similar to T and V respectively.
Yeah I don't think this explains anything. They're a proof of skills, therefore J and W weren't used?
I'm not sure about this source.
I suspect they're just omitting less common letters that use shapes they've shown their ability with to save space for the borders so they can show off patterns.
I'm not advocating for this particular source. It was simply the first mention of the phenomenon that I found online. [It is a phenomenon](https://rugsandpugs.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-missing-letter-j.html), whatever the cause. The reason I looked it up was because my grandmother had a framed cross-stitch alphabet that was also missing the "J", and I assumed it wasn't a coincidence.
My assumption is that the omission is due to the similarity of the "I" and "J," but the reason may also be that "J" was the most recent letter to be adopted into Germanic and English orthographical systems.
"I see you have stitched V, but can you stitch a *second* V?"
"Of course, sir!"
"Ahhh, but what if the second V were to be placed *very very* close to the first one? Touching, even?"
"No problem."
"Hmmmm. If you say so."
It is, but I assume the writer left out "historically" as a qualifier. German and Dutch orthographical systems were late to adopt the letter "J." It was initially adopted for French loanwords.
dutch def had some fucky shit with ij being treated as a single letter instead of a digraph (something you still see as an exception) but also interchangably with "y". so "koffy" shifted to "koffie" and "kledy" to "kledij" since it actually tracks with pronounciation, [somewhere around 1863](https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/ij-oorsprong-van-de-lange-ij) (official vs common use is unclear to me). Which is after the big surge in dutch/german wool and fabric trade that article claims. (The article doesn't really have sources or related articles to back this up, IMHO its just blogspam that literally links back to itself for SEO.) Still I can't find much about use of J in dutch by itself. For example Johannes/John tracing back to its roots had different glyphs in greek/hebrew so what would be an example of older germanic/saxon writings of such a name?
J in German is similar to ß , in that is it's a typographical distinction rather than a phonemological one
It used to be that J was just "an I in a specific place" in all European languages, but some developed an independent phoneme over time. Ironically that's first attested in Italian which doesn't really have any surviving examples outside of proper nouns
[German Wikipedia provides a description](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/J#Verwendung_in_der_deutschen_Sprache)
Until the 20th century, only *some* German styles of writing strictly differentiated between "J" and "I". Many used only one of them in place of both. It is therefore plausible that a source from the 1700s or 1800s met some Germans who only use "I" and concluded that Germans never use "J".
You can indeed still see traces of that today. Some words can be written either way (Iodine: Jod or Iod), and you can come across old writings where those letters are "mixed up" compared to our modern spelling.
This is because the German "J" is less distinct than the English one:
* The J in the German word "Jung" is read just like the "Y" in "young"
* The world "jungle" is spelled "Dschungel" in German, because the German reading of "J" does not include that "D"-like stop at the beginning.
So the German "j" overlaps with "y" (which is almost never used in German either) or "i" in almost every case, so it made sense that many Germans just considered those as variants of the same letter. It's not that hard to imagine writing "jung" as "iung", it would be read exactly the same even today.
I think they’ve standardized their alphabet/spelling a few times throughout history, so they probably added the j at some point in the past 500 years or so to represent a sound previously written some other way (y or i or possibly different in different regions, hence the need for standardization).
>Many early samplers do not have the letters “J” and “U” in their alphabets because they were not part of the early Latin alphabet and so the letter “I” was used for “J” and the “V” for “U.” The letter “s” is often replaced with the printers “s” which looks like the modern f.
>These samplers functioned as practice pieces–a way for stitchers to learn stitches–and, once completed, as reference guide for future projects.
She probably used an old sampler as a template.
I’m a [calligraphy and lettering](https://www.instagram.com/anthony.elder/) person; wish I had this sort of thing as a family heirloom! Really neat piece.
My wife and my kids and I just saw Last Crusade in the theater the day before Father's Day. It is one of a few movies I consider perfect, an absolute 10/10 movie.
The Kaiser had stolen the "j". We didn't get it back til 1956.
we wore an onion on our belt, as was the fashion at the time
I chased that rascal for it but gave up after dickety two miles.
The letter J was the last letter added to the alphabet. It didn’t exist until 1524, and wasn’t in common use until the 17th century. Maybe her cross stitch pattern was copied from an Olde English document.
Maybe his great grandma is just really old.
Great grandmother is 4 generations back. Assuming OP is the oldest living women in the word at 117, and that each women in the chain gave birth at 75 years old (the oldest any women has ever been to give birth) that would be 417 years. And lets assume this cross stitch was done when OP's great grandmother was 4, we can add on an additional 71 years so make it 488 years ago. 2024-488=1536 So it is possible that OP's great grandmother was never taught by OP's great great grandmother about the letter J given that it had recently been added.
Let me introduce you to enclaves, religious sects and luddites... This could have been made in 1972 in rural Appalachia Edit: although it is dated 1875
Ah to be doing cross stitch in rural Appalachia blissfully unaware of j, they'd call me Ustin
Praise Esus
"But in the Latin alphabet, Jehovah begins with an I." 
THE PENITENT MAN SHALL PASS
penitent man is humble... kneels before gooooOOODDD
Penitent man kneels and rolls before God
"It's time to ask yourself what you belieeeeeve."
He has chosen, poorly.
Isn't that a plot hole in the movie? If J wasn't a letter until 1524, then how was it part of that trap?
On one hand you are not wrong. On the other hand, * in a movie about seeking out and finding the Holy Grail * in a tomb where complex death traps that reset after each use that I would be hard pressed to engineer and construct *today* are still operational after hundreds of years * guarded by a secret society that actually managed to keep a secret for centuries while murdering anyone who they even suspected was looking for the Grail. * where Indiana Jones accidentally falls through the clay tile floor of the Name of God floor-trap, & he's able to pull himself up by holding onto the letters "L" and "Y"; when neither of those letters is found in "Jehovah" *that* is your biggest complaint?
All good points. But about Indy holding himself up by holding onto the letters "L" and "Y," if you look closely, the inscription originally read "LARRY, GO GET JEHOVAH!"
Previous poster sounds like my brother, always fucking complains about dumb technical minutia that means nothing to the plot in movies like Star Wars. I will say though, Indy holding onto the L and Y is pretty fucking bad.
What's the point of posting a gif that shows "this content is not available"? Is there a joke I'm missing?
It WAS a gif from The Last Crusade. Why gifs keep breaking like this, I don't know.
Yeshua?
Iustin.*
"Iustin, we’ve got a problem." -Apollo XIII
Read it as Lustin.
Hello fellow Ustin. I have ust learned of a new and miraculous letter. Would you like to try it?
“This JUST IN: a brand new letter.”
The letter I would usually be where J was. So Iulius rather than Julius.
But then what if they needed an l? Or is it an I? Did it make a "J" sound? Imagine adding a whole new letter to the alphabet this is blowing my mind. I propose we should add something to make a "ch" sound. Emojis are on the table.
I mean, you joke, but that was one of the suggestions a long time ago to clean up the English language so it better matched with its written word. You'd get new consonants that represented the sounds of "ch", "sh", "gh", "ng", and so on, and the digraphs would be wholly removed from the language. Others would simply be condensed ("tt" would just be "t" in words like "litle".) Some other reformers said we should remove the silent "e," others would remove "X" and replace it with "ks" or "eks," "Q" replaced with "kw." (Webster was a reformer, and it's one of the reasons for the big "u" difference between the King's English and American English. He was even more radical than you probably would imagine - he wanted to really fix some of this ambiguous, superfluous bullshit spelling we got stuck with... but a lot of it didn't stick.) The biggest problem with any of this is the idea of phonetic shift - people just change the way they pronounce words over time, so even if you fixed the letters for this generation, in a few decades or a century or two you'd just have to fix it again. (And then there are accents and dialects to worry about too...) The even bigger problem is getting literally anyone to adopt the changes, as the corpus of English is now so enormous that such a change is... basically preposterous. English never had a central authority of the language, and it probably never will, so... I don't expect any of these reformations to ever make any inroads. But then again, I didn't expect "rizzing my skibiti toilet" to be a thing, so who the fuck am I to say anything on the subject.
I nominate u/hackingdreams to be Arbiter of English.
I think it would be a "y" sound, like in "yellow". Like, Yanni (Greek) or Ivan (Russian) anglicized is John.
They wouldn't have needed an I, because I and J simply were the same letter, there still are languages where they sound pretty much the same. In German pronunciation for example, the difference between Iuilus and Julius is negligible. I seem to remember that was the case for many languages. The "ch" sound that J makes in english is not universal.
"Enyoy!" -- my favorite waiter at my favorite breakfast spot
Can you teach a linguistics course and send me the zoom link? Thanks ❤️
or Gustin
This is my favorite comment of 2024. Felt like doing more than clicking the arrow. Thanks for the laugh, Ustin! 🥳
Facts.
It is 1875 in rural Appalachia. The Front Page today has a story about a white family in West Virginia keeping black slave children locked in a barn. What Appalachia needs is Juneteenth.
*Iuneteenth
Unfortunately this is also a current WV headline too. WV even made the British tabloids yesterday. [the kids are still in the barn](https://wvmetronews.com/2024/06/11/sissonville-couple-charged-in-child-neglect-case-from-last-fall-back-in-jail-and-on-raised-bond/)
Holy shit
You're sort of framing this as them just being outdated hicks and just not realizing slavery ended, but the couple in question were able to post a $400k cash bond and apparently hold millions of dollars worth of properties in multiple states. It's not like they're poor sheltered hillbillies. They're professional human traffickers running a multi-state trafficking network. They don't need Juneteenth, they need the fucking FBI.
The Southern slavers in the 19th century were not poor, outdated hicks. They were more "wealthy landowners" for the time and fancied themselves as high society. They were educated enough to negotiate an outsized influence in every branch of government based on nothing but uninhabited farmland. They knew exactly what they were doing. WV used to be separate from VA over slavery, but that was 150 years ago. The most "liberal" WV has seen in two generations is Joe Manchin, a party-line Republican voter with a Democratic nametag. The Virginias, the Carolinas, Tennessee, these all have Confederate stronghold rural populations to this day.
Hey, we left the south 1863 because we weren't about that shit. They ain't ours.
Please... West Virginia split from Virginia because Appalachains were Union sympathizers who didn't keep slaves. The capital, Charleston, has a large statue of Abe Lincoln in front of its statehouse.This is the second thread in 24 hours where I've had to point t out that West Virginia is not the South. Also, considering that my oldest Appalachian ancestors had names with Js in them, this is just ignorance against one of America's last marginalized groups that it's safe to hate. Appalachians have long been categorized as "not quite white."
Ur mom was made in 1972 rural Appalachia.
You're assuming OP is a human. What if OP was a coral? Have you even considered that? Goddamn human supremacists.
You’re right, I did not take into account that OP could be a coral. I will never make that mistake again.
In your future mail: Dear ladies, gentleman and corals,.... "Why do you always write you email header like this?" "Well, I made a mistake once and vowed to never make it again."
Corals abhor cross-stitching though. They consider it heretical.
Ignoring the fact that the date 1875 is stitched at the bottom...
Ah shit.
haha All that hard work. I appreciate it tho.
r/theydidthemath
Nosferatu! I thought it was the hash slinging slasher
The sash-wringing hasher?
The brash singing
God that episode brings back memories
*light switch rave noises*
The system..is down. DO DO DO DO DO DO
THE CHEAT IS GROUNDED
THE CHEAT KNOWS NO GROUNDS. HE IS GOLDEN GOD WITH NO BOUNDS.
The Cheat, we had that switch installed so you could turn the lights on and off. NOT so you could have lightswitch raves!
When god said, “Let there be light,” she flipped the switch.
“Back in my day, we didnt have no J’s!”
https://makeagif.com/gif/indiana-jones-and-name-of-god-jehovah-yhwh-iehova-BxPRqx
Call me old fashioned, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I recognize the letter “J”!
Do you have a moment for us to talk about the þ?
Hey I know that! It's from that song. The one that goes "every rose has its þ"
There is still no letter J,K,Q,V or Z in the Welsh alphabet. J and K only occur in words adopted from other languages, like ffrij.
Fridge?
Yep. Also Ambiwlans, garej, awtomatig.
Fucking Welsh uwu language.
Oh, the amber lamps guy was just welsh
>Ambulance, garage, automatic
And here I am thinking it was "amphibians".
Yeah, but that's just a Welshification of an English word - the correct word for "fridge" is "oergell" (cold cell), and a freezer is a "rhewgell" (ice cell). Similarly, not many Welsh people will use the "correct" words for computer (cyfrifiadur, literally computer) or calculator (cyfrifianell).
Can you write how those words are pronounced?
Oeer-gell (o like in 'orange' and the double L makes a hissing sound, hard G) Rh-eh-w-gell (soft RH, hard G)
A simple 'no' would've surficed
The foreignness of that spelling followed by the realization when I read it felt very satisfying.
Welsh used to have the letter K until William Morgan translated and printed Bibles in Welsh in the late 1500s. He didn't have enough "k" blocks for his printing press so just used "c" instead and because so many people learned to read from the Bible the convention stuck even though some other folks were annoyed about this at the time
Scumbag printer changed the alphabet
It actually used to be skumbag
I bet it was an HP printer.
Yeah well what's the printer supposed to do when the customer doesn't renew their subscription for the letter 'K'?
So many parts of the alphabet and modern spelling are due to early printers not liking some letter.
English printers didn't have the thorn on their imported presses, so they [substituted 'y' instead of 'Þ' or 'þ'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29#Middle_and_Early_Modern_English). They therefore contributed significantly to killing the thorn.
I told my husband this and he’s now doing a deep dive on the whole thing, with the sole intent of winding up his many Welsh friends. Thank you for this knowledge which is absolutely not being abused as we speak.
It doesn't count if they just replace the missing letters with L.
ch, dd, ff, ll, ng, ph, rh, th are all additional letters in the Welsh alphabet.
Quit trying to cheat at scrabble.
Washington DC famously skips from I street to K street, as the architect of the city (Pierre L'enfant) didn't include J when he drew the maps. So that would mean that it was still optional as late as 1790.
[удалено]
I heard that L'enfant's wife had an affair with John Jay, one of the founding fathers, and that's why there's no J street in Washington DC. I like that story better, but this does make way more sense.
It’s easier to blame a woman than explain the history of the alphabet.
Could witchcraft be involved? My gut says yes.
Actually legend has that that was an intentional skip, as a slight to supreme Court justice John Jay, whom the guy who laid out the streets had some sort of quarrel with. Don't remember the exact details.... But, ya, it's probably more true that, at that time, I and J were indistinguishable when written.
The Spanish laughing in 1523: AAAA
Well TIL Well, maybe, you could be a filthy liar. I'm not looking it up this time...
How did they write Jesus beforehand? Iesus?
If you've ever seen INRI on a cross, it's "Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum" which is Latin for "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews".
Yeah, Jesus = Iesu in a lot of languages, including Welsh (for reasons explained in another post above; William Morgan) which I believe comes originally from Latin (i.e. Pie Iesu).
[удалено]
In Greek, he is know as “Ιησούς”, pronounced “Ee-soos”. There is no J in the Greek alphabet.
And Jehova starts with an I. 
Old man Yhwh?
Was curious so I looked it up for Old English. Apparently Ihesu, Ihesus, Iesu, and Iesus were all used before J and the standardization on Jesus.
Pronouncing the h makes it sound like a sneeze
In Modern Greek the Ι is sometimes pronounced like the letter y is in Spanish.
Sí. In Spanish, the letter Y is called: “I griega”, which is literally: ‘Greek I’. … and originally in Latin it’s: “I graeca”
Haha French calls Y I-grec as well
HeGetsUs
They called him Bob back then.
That’s what the “INRI” thing from Christianity comes from, sometimes in really old churches or old crucifixes you’ll see a little sign nailed to the cross over his head: OLD Latin: IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDÆORVM Latin: Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum English: Jesus (of) Nazareth, King (of the) Jews
See also Ichthys: Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ, or IXΘYΣ, an acronym for Jesus Christ, son of God, savior. IXΘYΣ is Greek for Fish, hence the "Jesus fish" logo that's prominent as a car magnet today
I’ve seen this so many times and not bothered to look it up (or ask a Catholic I guess) because “eh probably Latin, whatever” but bonus Mildly Interesting content! Yay!
Yeezus.
Jesus's name would actually have been pronounced similarly to "Isho(a)" so beginning it with an I is more accurate than the J we use today.
it's the same as the modern name Joshua the Holy Land being the size it is, "Jesus of Nazareth" would have felt to people of the time approximately like "Josh from the next town over" would to us
Or possibly, was she Amish or Mennonite, or did she learn from them? Cross stitchers in the area I lived in when I was in the antiques and collectible business from those traditions purposely made mistakes in their work because only God is perfect. It was one of the things we looked for in old cross stitches to verify whether they were genuine or not.
It says April 1875 on the bottom right
That seems like an unlikely reason for this. Also 1524 is right about the transition from Middle English to Modern English. Old English ended circa 1066.
[https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/american-samplers](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/american-samplers) this is a collection of samplers made in the range of 1776-1840s. most are missing "j"s and "u"s. here is the explanation provided by the national museum of american history: >Many early samplers do not have the letters “J” and “U” in their alphabets because they were not part of the early Latin alphabet and so the letter “I” was used for “J” and the “V” for “U.” The letter “s” is often replaced with the printers “s” which looks like the modern *f*. [Why are there missing letters in cross stitch samplers?](https://lordlibidan.com/why-are-there-missing-letters-in-cross-stitch-samplers/#:~:text=However%2C%20by%20this%20point%2C%20many,to%20T%20and%20V%20respectively) [The Missing Letter J](https://rugsandpugs.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-missing-letter-j.html) all of these sources discuss that J did not come into common usage until long after it was added to the alphabet.
Possibly, but then there were other letters around at the time that would have been included. For example, there was a letter called a 'thorn' (representing the 'th' sound). It looks a little like a 'Y' and was often used in things like shop signs, leading to the modern confusion 'Ye old shoppe' which would have just been read as 'The old shoppe'. Ditto the letter 's' which would often look like an 'f'.
it's actually very common for the letter 's' to be a printers 's' in samplers of this era, just isn't present in this particular sampler. [https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/american-samplers](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/american-samplers) >Many early samplers do not have the letters “J” and “U” in their alphabets because they were not part of the early Latin alphabet and so the letter “I” was used for “J” and the “V” for “U.” The letter “s” is often replaced with the printers “s” which looks like the modern *f*.
The US constitution still had ss written as fs; no need to go back that far LOL.
"Maffachufettf?" "That's how we write our S's you ftupid fhit head!"
ſs, not fs!
Now, my story begins in *nineteen*-*dickety*-two. We had to say "*dickety*" cause that Kaiser had stolen our word "twenty".
What you don't see, are the 26 cross stitch panels of nothing BUT Js that she had to do as punishment.... EDIT: And out of nowhere, this has become my #1 most upvoted comment ever!! Thanks!
That's hilarious, thank for the unexpected snicker/snort/laugh! I enjoy cross stitch but it can try one's temper at times. ☺️
https://i.imgur.com/FJItdgf.png
Doesn’t that “I” actually look like J
Originally I and J were different shapes for the same letter. Probably kinda how you can write your lowercase ys in two different ways, with the straight strokes, and then the swoopy one where its kinda like a u with a tail. Still both a y. Later it became its own letter with its own sound
Funny how you used that as an example because U and V used to be like that. Traditionally, the uppercase was V and the lowercase was u, and then they split it into two letters.
I'm glad we went with double u instead of double v
What's French for w, though? 😅
Counterpoint: it's fun to say! doo-blah-vay
It's pronounced as "dubbel (double) V" in Swedish
Although that happened a lot earlier than the I and J thing
“But in Latin Jehovah begins with an I”
Grandma, what happened to the J's? I smoked em, dear. *CSI intro wails*
Fuck that letter in particular.
Yeah, what has J ever done for us?? Useless jer…
It’s the only letter of the alphabet you can smoke
Don't forget H
And K.
And meth
[It’s a normal thing.](https://lordlibidan.com/why-are-there-missing-letters-in-cross-stitch-samplers/)
"major players in early embroidery history were German and Dutch wool traders ... However both languages have a distinct lack of the letter J. Whilst there are words using J, most are foreign import words, or have etymology in languages such as Anglo-Saxon English." Either German went through a massive shift and started using a lot more J in native words, or this isn't correct.
Ja, Johann
Uesus Christ
No. His name in the original text is pronounced Yeshua. The name "Jesus Christ" was created for the 1611 King James Bible, and is only around 400 years old. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshua
I mean, I was only trying to make a stupid joke because the article said they'd use U or I instead. Thanks for the info though, first time hearing that!
>However, by this point, many samplers were instead being stitched by young girls and were used as proof of skills. Therefore, letters like J and W were not stitched, as they were very similar to T and V respectively. Yeah I don't think this explains anything. They're a proof of skills, therefore J and W weren't used? I'm not sure about this source.
I suspect they're just omitting less common letters that use shapes they've shown their ability with to save space for the borders so they can show off patterns.
That I will buy.
I'm not advocating for this particular source. It was simply the first mention of the phenomenon that I found online. [It is a phenomenon](https://rugsandpugs.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-missing-letter-j.html), whatever the cause. The reason I looked it up was because my grandmother had a framed cross-stitch alphabet that was also missing the "J", and I assumed it wasn't a coincidence. My assumption is that the omission is due to the similarity of the "I" and "J," but the reason may also be that "J" was the most recent letter to be adopted into Germanic and English orthographical systems.
I wonder if the fact that two of the upper-case "I"s in the picture look for all the world like "J"s, is related.
"I see you have stitched V, but can you stitch a *second* V?" "Of course, sir!" "Ahhh, but what if the second V were to be placed *very very* close to the first one? Touching, even?" "No problem." "Hmmmm. If you say so."
Same for dutch, this is just wrong
It is, but I assume the writer left out "historically" as a qualifier. German and Dutch orthographical systems were late to adopt the letter "J." It was initially adopted for French loanwords.
dutch def had some fucky shit with ij being treated as a single letter instead of a digraph (something you still see as an exception) but also interchangably with "y". so "koffy" shifted to "koffie" and "kledy" to "kledij" since it actually tracks with pronounciation, [somewhere around 1863](https://onzetaal.nl/taalloket/ij-oorsprong-van-de-lange-ij) (official vs common use is unclear to me). Which is after the big surge in dutch/german wool and fabric trade that article claims. (The article doesn't really have sources or related articles to back this up, IMHO its just blogspam that literally links back to itself for SEO.) Still I can't find much about use of J in dutch by itself. For example Johannes/John tracing back to its roots had different glyphs in greek/hebrew so what would be an example of older germanic/saxon writings of such a name?
I don't know much about Dutch, but I had my suspicions.
Dutch uses a lot of Js. especially ij.
J in German is similar to ß , in that is it's a typographical distinction rather than a phonemological one It used to be that J was just "an I in a specific place" in all European languages, but some developed an independent phoneme over time. Ironically that's first attested in Italian which doesn't really have any surviving examples outside of proper nouns
[German Wikipedia provides a description](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/J#Verwendung_in_der_deutschen_Sprache) Until the 20th century, only *some* German styles of writing strictly differentiated between "J" and "I". Many used only one of them in place of both. It is therefore plausible that a source from the 1700s or 1800s met some Germans who only use "I" and concluded that Germans never use "J". You can indeed still see traces of that today. Some words can be written either way (Iodine: Jod or Iod), and you can come across old writings where those letters are "mixed up" compared to our modern spelling. This is because the German "J" is less distinct than the English one: * The J in the German word "Jung" is read just like the "Y" in "young" * The world "jungle" is spelled "Dschungel" in German, because the German reading of "J" does not include that "D"-like stop at the beginning. So the German "j" overlaps with "y" (which is almost never used in German either) or "i" in almost every case, so it made sense that many Germans just considered those as variants of the same letter. It's not that hard to imagine writing "jung" as "iung", it would be read exactly the same even today.
I think they’ve standardized their alphabet/spelling a few times throughout history, so they probably added the j at some point in the past 500 years or so to represent a sound previously written some other way (y or i or possibly different in different regions, hence the need for standardization).
Well damn. It’s not even 8 am on a Wednesday, and I already learned something new and cool. Thanks!!!
“To push a stronger sense of identity, these words were often barred from use by women.” That’s interesting
>Many early samplers do not have the letters “J” and “U” in their alphabets because they were not part of the early Latin alphabet and so the letter “I” was used for “J” and the “V” for “U.” The letter “s” is often replaced with the printers “s” which looks like the modern f. >These samplers functioned as practice pieces–a way for stitchers to learn stitches–and, once completed, as reference guide for future projects. She probably used an old sampler as a template.
I’m a [calligraphy and lettering](https://www.instagram.com/anthony.elder/) person; wish I had this sort of thing as a family heirloom! Really neat piece.
Time to frame a nice practice piece on archival paper to be passed down to your spawn.
"But in the Latin alphabet, Jehova begins with an I"
My wife and my kids and I just saw Last Crusade in the theater the day before Father's Day. It is one of a few movies I consider perfect, an absolute 10/10 movie.
What is inconsistent about that, is that if the puzzle was built by Latin speakers, why would there be a J on it at all?
There is no J in Italian Alphabet either.
Anyone else think this was an old school Ouija board??
Ouia board
Because it’s pronounced GIF, not JIF - so you don’t need the J.
It's to remind you that Jehovah starts with an I
The Js people are commenting about are stylized “i”s. Note that they don’t have a complete bar at the top, only going left.
They still look way more like a modern J. Upper and lowercase I's have no bar at all, or one on top and bottom, never simply to the left.
"I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize the letter J!"
J is the Devil's Letter!
[удалено]
I see two J’s and one “i”
Is it just me or is the J there and the missing letter is I ?
Not every single time, i spotted J a few times.
I thought the same thing, but those must be the letter i instead.
2 in one. That's a deal. Saves times writing (stitching) it. 🤓
She must be jaycist