Many Sicilian civil records or portions of records, when handwritten  in the Italian language, show individual’s surnames as Ajello, Alajmo, Lo Jacono, Ajera, and so on.  Occupations, professions and status of many persons are given as zolfatajo, caprajo, pecorajo, etc.  Many printed documents also use a character that looks like j.

     This leads many novice researchers (and experienced ones as well) to assume that the letter that appears as a "j" is truly a "j", and is pronounced like the letter "j" in English.  It is not.

     The Sicilian language is extensively derived from Latin, and the Italian language was developed with Latin and Sicilian influences. If we consider Latin, there was no letter in that language that was pronounced like the English "j".  That means for example, that Julius Caesar's given name was pronounced not "JOO-lee-us", but "YOO-lee-us".  Again the letter that LOOKS like a J is actually an I, pronounced like the English "Y".

     An argument presented by some contends that "J/j" is a valid Sicilian letter because early archaic Sicilian texts show the letter.  This is not proof that "J/j", as pronounced in English (IPA symbol dʒ), was part of the Sicilian language pronunciation.  Yes, it appears in old texts, but in situations as noted above, as an "i" with a tail, pronounced like the English "Y/y", which is the sound expressed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as <y>, not dʒ.

     Here is a portion of an early 1800's church index of deaths for the town of Mussomeli, in Caltanisetta province, written in Latin.  The indices in that era, for this town, were organized by the given name of the decedent, then the relationship of the person to the other person listed, then the page number on which the death record can be found.  Note that the list includes the names Joanna, Jsabella, Joseph, Jgnatius, etc., because the script letter that LOOKS like a "J" is actually an upper-case "I".  There are no separate indices for "I" and "J", because they are the same letter.

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