' How did J get its sound? '...

Both I and J were used interchangeably by scribes to express the sound of both the vowel and the consonant.

It wasn’t until 1524 when Gian Giorgio Trissino, an Italian Renaissance grammarian known as the father of the letter J, made a clear distinction between the two sounds.

Trissino’s contribution is important because once he distinguished the soft J sound, as in “jam” (probably a loan sound), he was able to identify the Greek “Iesus” a translation of the Hebrew “Yeshua,” as the Modern English “Jesus.”

Thus the current phoneme for J was born. It always goes back to Jesus.

The English language is infamous for matching similar phonemes with different letters and J is certainly no exception.

In addition to the aforementioned soft J sound, as in “jam,” which is phonetically identical to the soft G as in “general,” the J in Taj Mahal takes on a slight variation of that same sound and is probably the closest to Trissino’s original phonetic interpretation.

And, coming full circle, the J sound you hear in the word “hallelujah” is pronounced “halleluyah.”



- from Dictionary.com