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22-04-2026, 05:10 PM
(This post was last modified: 22-04-2026, 05:55 PM by nablator.)
(22-04-2026, 04:50 PM)RadioFM wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Exactly my thoughts. Even though modern day French (and Picard) seem to pronounce word-initial y exclusively with the "soft" /j/ sound whereas word-initial j with "harder" /ʒ/ (resp. /d͡ʒ/) sounds, I think it's certainly plausible for some medieval scribes to have abused the y=i interchangeability, extending it to word-initial positions as well, especially back then when orthography was far from standardized. Thus, /ʒo'lɛt/ /d͡ʒol'lɛt/ or some variation of that could have been rendered iollet jollet or yollet, all three pronounced the same, unlike nowadays where yollet would definitely be read /jo'lɛt/
I don't know if the pronunciation was different than it is now, but in writing of medieval Latin and French they sometimes replaced "i" with "y" (more often the first letter) inconsistently, meaninglessly, especially in uncommon words (so they looked more exotic? IDK) like this "ydolorum": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
They didn't write any "j" at all except as a last "i" in "ij", a very consistent writing convention, not a letter: you can't find any other "j" in manuscripts. Transcriptions often "modernize" medieval Latin and French by replacing "i" with "j" using modern conventions that didn't exist at the time. A capital "J" in manuscripts is actually a curved "I". Latin set the standard and since the alphabet didn't have anything between "i" and "k", it was not possible to write a letter "j" that didn't exist yet in French or Latin. The custom of writing "j" for a phonetic reason in French and Latin didn't really catch until centuries later. It may have started in German first, then Italian in the 16th century.
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23-04-2026, 12:38 PM
(This post was last modified: 23-04-2026, 01:59 PM by nablator.)
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