I’d keep it in, if you want Finns to use your fonts. One of the most common words here is ja, meaning and. Of course, we could always combine i and comma or something if we needed it.

hmmm...
my name is spelled with a J...
I think you would piss some people of
if you leave it out. It will look like your
font is not complete

Dutch speaking folk tend to use the J quite often, so I would keep it in ;-)
Strange idea anyway to kick a letter out of a font...

I guess typodermic is just kidding, isn’t he?

Yes, he’s “J”oking...

We got by without the J in the Latin alphabet for centuries. I’m sure it could fall by the wayside again, like the long s did nearly two hundred years ago. And does anyone even know what to use a Wynn for?

Wynn? it was used to write the phoneme /w/ before the invention of the letter W from the merging of doubled V.

More importantly, what did Wynn look like in when in blackletter? Or was it with thorn and P in a situation like J and I?

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Without J you couldn’t have jazz, and that’s not cool...

JH

:)

Without J you couldn’t have jazz, and that’s not cool...

Yes you could so have jazz. You could try something, you know—improvize. What would jazz musicians do if J disappeared overnite? They would improvize man.

Like Rayberto, I am kidding.

Ray, just leave it out and plug it in don’t worry about it breakin’. It’s factory-made and guaranteed and would I fake it?

j a m e s

I think it would help global warming more to leave out the letter e and t. They are used very frequently so all of our text would become much shorter so we would need less paper and not have to cut down as many trees. See, there is a perfect example, “trees” would become simply “rs” and if we also left out r and s? well, there would be fewer rs cut down—I mean fewer cut down. See how simple that is?

ChrisL

IIRC, the J was originally a swash I. It came to be used in English for the sound of the J in “Jack,” which doesn’t exist in Latin. Or I believe in German. In German, I believe if you put I’s in place of J’s, nothing would change as far as pronunciation.

The yogh is making a comeback so we’ll have to get rid of some letter due to the Law of Conservation of Letters.

As comedy writers, I don’t think any of us should quit our day obs. These okes are terrible.

But I don’t even believe in Gebus! ;)

It came to be used in English for the sound of the J in “Jack,” which doesn’t exist in Latin.

I’ve always been confused about historic pronunciation of IVLIVS and TRIANVS. Damn my public schools for dropping Latin!

I am all up for using the “Yeshua” spelling. So no need for a J. :)
_____________________________________________
Personal Art and Design Portal of Ivan Gulkov
www.ivangdesign.com

Seriously, the alphabet we use currently has evolved over time in a completely willy nilly fashion with a great many redundancies that don’t really enrich language at all. As designers, we all know this, yet we it meekly accept it as a fact of life. But does it need to be like that? NO. It doesn’t. We’re designers, after all. I think that now would be as good a time as any for some rationalization and culling of unnecessary and wasteful letters, in much the same way that the dozens of different and idiocentric weights and measures systems used in France were culled and replaced by the infinitely more rational metric system at the end of the 18th century.

We could probably whittle the number of letters in the standard alphabet down by 25% to 30%.

Taking the letter “J” as an example: In many languages it is pronounced as a “Y” sound or even an “h”. In French, it is pronounced “zh”, so the assertion that these languages can’t get by without a “j” is simply not true. The name, James is really Iago. Jack is really John which is really Ivan, and so on. Jorge is really George, and is pronound Horhay anyhow! If a “J” sound is really ever actually required, “ge” or “zh” work just fine.

@ jazzhustler: My Norwegian Grandmother, didn’t like any music that didn’t have a polka beat, or sound like it was made up by Vikings in quiet moments between pillagings. Any other form of music, she would denounce fiercely with: “Dat’s yoost yass!” You see. There’s my point; no need for “j”, “th” “u” or even “z”. You’ll always have yass. (or iass, since the “y” is really just a redundancy of the letter “i”) Cutting the alphabet down by 30% is actually quite conservative, when you think about it.

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@ russellm
Interesting reflections. And how would the Dutch cope with the omission of the letter “J”?

Matthew: More importantly, what did Wynn look like in when in blackletter?

The typical Anglo-Saxon bookhand isn’t what I would classify as blackletter. There are some good examples here:
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/mss.html

The wynn is very similar in form to the p, and doubtless easily mistaken for it.

Oh, to heck with the Dutch. Can’t they learn Flemish or Waloon or something?

(KIDDING! some of my best friends would be Dutch if I knew more Dutch people.)

:o)

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¡Joder! NO

Héctor

I live in Prague, although I’m American, and I think that this is not such a good idea. In Czech, it’s extremely common, and even in English, J is still common.

I cannot support any effort to remove J from the alphabet...I am, after all, JT the Ninja. The letter J has always been a large part of my identity. Without the letter J, I would become a rather indeterminate IT...

Peace,
JT

Reminds me of an amazing 1996 Potlatch paper sample book. It was huge and chronicled the career of the fictional “Ben Day” and among his many accomplishments was the creation of the typeface “Cueless.” The specimen page was basically just Trade Gothic or some similar face with the explanation:

“Stalled on a problem, Ben did a statistical study of the standard Roman alphabet, and, finding that the letter q was the least used, eliminated it. It was a typographic apotheosis. The Cueless typeface was born, one of many that Ben was to create.”

I suppose I could get by on my given Hebrew name, Yeshai, but it just doesn’t quite have that punch sound of the ’J’ in Jesse.

we need to get out more...

JH

Ja.

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I’m French and I’m afraid we couldn’t do without J over here — “je” being the personal pronoun first person singular (the English “I”, the German “Ich”, etc.) it is used quite often, as in “Je vous aime, Mademoiselle” (very useful if you’re vacationing in Paris someday).