Contents › Section 1: Phonetics, phonology and orthography › answer 15 of 32
How is it that such varied sounds (in major European Languages) came to be represented by the same letter "j"?
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This is a question that probably has a quite straightforward answer: historical development.
Various European languages adopted the Latin alphabet through different routes and mapped it differently onto their phonological systems.
j is a bit of a special case (similarly to 'u' and some others) since in Latin, it did not represent a separate phoneme but was only a graphical variant of i used in certain contexts.
So it wasn't until quite late that various languages decided to use it to represent different sounds as the need arose. For instance, German started using j to represent /j/ only in late 15th century. In Czech, for instance, j represented the long vowel /i:/ while /j/ was written as /g/ until the beginning of the 19th century.
Wikipedia has more details for other languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).