Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/552

 528 JTHIS letter is a modified I. If we consider its place . in the alphabet immediately after I, and the corre sponding position of V and W after U, we are naturally led to conclude that the new letter was intentionally formed by some one who wished to have a special symbol to denote the palatal consonant y, into which i readily passes, just as iv denotes the labial consonant into which u passes. For the symbol is a new one. It is not found in the Latin alphabet, in which I was employed alike for the vowel and consonant though sometimes the I was doubled for the consonant. So far, however, as we can see. J in its origin was nothing but a fancy of the scribes. In 15th century English MSS. the i-symbol was drawn a little below the line to denote J, and by degrees this was curled slightly to the left. Again in writing numbers such as vii, viii, it was usual to write uij, uiij, &c. This was imitated in early printing, and hence arose./, the earliest regularly curled form. At the same time we find only I in capitals, not J a modern letter made to correspond with little/ This at least seems to have been the history of the symbol in England, and possibly the French history is similar. It follows from this that the value of J ought to have been in all languages, not that which it has with us, nor yet that which it has in France, but that which it has in Germany, e.g., in &quot; Jahr,&quot; our &quot;year,&quot; which is retained by us in the borrowed Hebrew word &quot; Hallelujah.&quot; But generally in English J denotes the sound which is best represented by dzh ; in this compound zli represents the French /sound : the difference between the two may be well seen by comparing the English &quot; John &quot; with French &quot; Jean &quot; (Engl. J = dzh, Fr. J = zli). J, however, is not the only symbol which we employ to represent this sound ; we also use G in &quot; gem,&quot; &quot; gin,&quot; and GE at the end of words such as &quot; edge,&quot; hedge,&quot; &quot; wedge,&quot; &quot; knowledge,&quot; &quot; singe &quot; ; while the 2/i-sound (which is the sonant corresponding to the surd sh in &quot;shall,&quot; &quot;wish,&quot; &c.) is never represented with us by J, but by numerous other letters, e.g., in rou&amp;lt;/e (a word borrowed from the French), pleasure, division, See A. J. Ellis, Early English Pronunciation, c. The way in which this cM-sound arose seems to have been as follows. In mediaeval Latin an inorganic c?-so und was produced before a y-sound, sometimes when medial, as in &quot;ma-d-ius&quot; for &quot;maius,&quot; sometimes initial, as in &quot;diacere&quot; for &quot; iacere.&quot; This arose from a careless pronunciation of the palatal y. That sound has been liable to obscuration in many languages notably in Greek, in which a 8 was de veloped before it to a very remarkable degree ; see Curtius, Grundziige, book iii. D. iii. A simple example may be seen in the particle 877, which is identical with German &quot; ja &quot; our &quot; yea &quot;: the sound of the word was originally ya ; then in Greek a d sprang up before the y, producing dyd ; and finally the y was expelled altogether, leaving the d- sound alone. Sometimes a double sound was produced (denoted by the symbol z) as in typta for (cZ)yam-ia or tA.7nw for IXmS-yo ; here the sound may have been dzh, but was more probably dz ; be this as it may, the change in Greek, which produced a great effect upon the language, may help us to understand how the d sprang up in late Latin, and how the compound sound dzh was perpetuated in Italian but there represented by gi, as in &quot; giacere,&quot; &quot; Giacomo,&quot; &c. and in Old French, in which language it passed at a later time into the modern 2/i-sound described above. But it was introduced into England from France with its original value in French words. The sound, however, had already existed m England in words of Teutonic origin, the class already mentioned ending in ge ; &quot; edge &quot; was originally spelt &quot; ecg,&quot; and was doubtless sounded as we now sound &quot; egg &quot;; but the finals-sound had been palatized, though probably not before the 13th century. These are the two sources of the cZ^A-sound in England, and it is noteworthy that the sound when final has never been spelt with j, as though a consciousness of the difference of origin in these cases lingered on in the language. A parallel change (but much more common) has taken place in the /t-sound : this passed into a cA-sound in very many words arid not merely at the end, but also at the beginning as in &quot;chill,&quot; &quot;child^&quot; &quot;church,&quot; &c., and this c/i-sound is not the simple palatal ch, but tsh, which therefore bears exactly the same relation to k as dzh (our j) bears to g. It appears then that the symbol J ceased to have its proper signification in English by connexion with that of another compound sound borrowed from the French. Meanwhile another symbol Y was being prepared to do the work of J. G at the beginning of a word was often weakened into the y-sound : thus &quot;&amp;lt;/enew&quot; (comp. German &quot; genug &quot;) became &quot; ynow,&quot; our &quot; enough.&quot; Then the old English form of g (that is, 3) was used to express this ?/-sound, and out of it the symbol y was gradually developed, while the French form (g or nearly so) was kept for the momentary sound. In Spanish the symbol J denotes the momentary sound corresponding to y, that is, the palatal denoted by ch in German, and heard also in Scotland, e.g., in &quot;loch.&quot; JABALPUR, or JuBBULPORE, 1 a British district in the commissionership of the Central Provinces, India, between 21 12 and 23 56 N. lat., and between 7G 40 and 81 35 E. long., is bounded on the N. by Panna and Maihar, on the E. by Rewah, on the S. by the districts of Mandla, Seonf, and Narsinhpur, and on the W. by Damoh district. Jabalpur consists of a long narrow plain running north east and south-west, and shut in on all sides by highlands. This plain, which forms an offshoot from the great valley of the Nerbudda, is covered in its western and southern portions by a rich alluvial deposit of black cotton-soil. At Jabalpur town the soil is sandy, and water plentiful near the surface. The north and east belong to the Ganges and Jumna basins, the south and west to the Nerbudda basin. Thus between Jabalpur and MirzApur lies the great watershed betwixt the Gulf of Cambay and the Bay of Bengal. The Nerbudda flows through the district for 70 miles from east to west, passing about 9 miles below Jabalpur town through the famous marble rocks, where it throws itself from a rocky ledge with a fall of 30 feet, called Dhudn-dhar, or the &quot; misty shoot.&quot; The population was estimated in 1877 at 555,796 ; but a more careful census taken in 1872 returned it at 528,859, of whom 270,237 were males and 258,622 females. The ethnical division iu 1877 showed Europeans, 776 ; Eurasians, 201 ; aboriginal tribes, 105,349 ; Hindus, 416,770 ; Mahometans, 27,282 ; Buddhists and Jains, 3654. Jabalpur, the capital, which has a population of 55.188, is the only town with more than 5000 inhabitants. Of the total area of 3918 square miles, only 1320 are cultivated, but 1308 more are returned as cultivable. Of the cultivated land 3949 acres are irrigated entirely by private enterprise. Cereals, rice, cotton, and oil-seeds are the principal crops. The district is rich in garden 1 The division of Jabalpur or Jubbulpore is one of the four which make up the Central Provinces. It comprises the districts of Jabalpur, Sagar (Saugor), Damoh, Seoni, and Mandla, has an area of 18,564 square miles, and in 1878 had a population of 1,839,100.