de jure or de iure

    • When I was doing my undergraduate law course we came across the following:

    Ubi societas, ibi ius - Wherever there is society there is law

    which seems to be the original Latin.

    However, in relation to (English) Common Law, we also encountered:

    Ubi jus, ibi remedium - Where there is a wrong (recte. law), there is a remedy

    You will probably know that dates ending in a succession of 'iii' often had the last 'i' written as 'j', too in later periods. Coupled with the fact that <I> is often interchangeable with <J> in the English Middle Period.

    For your particular phrase, I write de jure and was told to pronounce it as 'day JOO-ray'.
     
    Greetings all

    In classical Latin the alphabetic letter 'I' functions sometimes as a vowel (as in e.g. civis), sometimes as a consonant (as in ius), pronounced like English 'Y' in words such as 'year' or 'yesterday'. In the orthography of mediaeval manuscripts the convention became current of distinguishing these uses of the same symbol as 'I' for the vowel and 'J' for the consonant.

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    "There are two main ways of spelling and printing Latin: academic and Ramist. The “Ramist” form, which distinguishes semivocalic “J” from “I” and semivocalic “V” from “U,” is named after its early proponent, iconoclast French humanist logician and mathematician Pierre de la Ramée [1515-1572 (murdered)], Latinized as Petrus Ramus. " Modern Latin Spelling
     
    Welsh_Sion said:
    was told to pronounce it as 'day JOO-ray'.
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    Sorry, who told you that? It sounds terrible to my Italian ears - and not Latin at all (in particular the final y's, as in Latin the e letter was never a diphthong). May I suggest 'deh YOOreh' (no h is heard, of course: I wrote eh to indicate that the e sound must be retained without any Y or i)..
     
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    :D
     
    Perseas said:
    Has "j" replaced "i" during the years or is it about an influence from English?
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    It is surely not the influence of English. The letter "J" appears in medieval Latin words and abbreviations and borrowings from Latin also in Central and Eastern Europe. See for example:

    JUDr. (the title of "doctor of law") < "Iuris Utriusque Doctor" .
    jr. (junior, "the younger") < "iunior"
    de jure < "de iure"
    gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus < ... "iuvenes" ...
    etc ...

    Borrowings:
    Hungarian: június, július, Jupiter, ...
    Slovak: jún, júl, Jupiter, ...
    etc ...

    In all the above examples "j" is pronounced as a consonant equal to the Spanish "y" in yo, ya, ayuda, etc ...
     
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    saluete omnes!

    I agree with francisgranada's comment (# 10), but would suggest that German is a likelier influence than English or central European languages: in the mediaeval German lands there were plenty of monasteries and other ecclesiastical institutions in which classical literature, especially Latin, was read, transcribed and copied, some of them, like Fulda, with very substantial manuscript collections.

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    bearded said:
    I would rather call it a "semi-vowel".
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    I do understand and "non ti voglio cotraddire" :) ...

    However e.g. in Slavic languages and in Hungarian "j" is perceived as consonant. Thus, "ju" and "iu" in native words are in general or typically pronounced a bit differently.

    I have been told by a native Argentinian that the Spanish words hierba and yerba are (or should be) also pronounced differently.
     
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