Euro East/West Cultural Correlations: the letter "J", Public Transport, and Eurodance

[Visitor1980]

(this should probably be moved to "European Culture")

These are probably controversial and a bit random, but I came up with three specific differences that firmly separate Western Europe from Eastern Europe.

The following map gives a rough estimate of these differences, and I may have made some mistakes, but these are differences that could have interesting correlations. To me, the red areas are a different civilization from the "blue" civilization.

1) The use of the letter "J" to denote the Y-sound in English (either in the native Latin alphabet or in their Standard Cyrillic Latin transliteration, which Cyrillic Slavic languages also use)
2) Popularity of non-bus electric overground public transportation -- i.e. trams, as well as (in Eastern Europe) trolley buses
3) Popularity of Eurodance, a genre of techno pop music with minor chords (sadness) and fast cheesy melodies



As you can see, most countries in the "blue" civilization are Central and Eastern Europe, but the Netherlands is actually part of Central Europe culturally.
The "red" civilization is what we consider Western Europe. The UK, France, Spain, but not Germany and not the Netherlands. These turn out to be non-Western in my criteria.
There are some exceptions that I colored yellow: Romania is a culturally Eastern-Euro country with non-bus public transport, but uses the letter "J" similar to Western Europe. Italy sort of has non-bus public transport but doesn't use the letter "J" at all.

My understanding is this:
- Western European countries don't use the letter "J" to represent the Y-sound.
- Western European countries don't like public transport all that much. Sure, they have buses and trains and metro, but they don't have non-bus overground transport such as trams. Paris, a cosmopolitan European city, did away with trams long ago and never reinstituted them. London is a surprisingly sprawly city (and Anglos seem to prefer sprawl generally -- America doesn't have much city transport), so they don't have much elaborate public transport.
- Western European countries don't like Eurodance. For example, the UK gave the world Rock and Rock'n'Roll (e.g. the Beatles, Rolling Stones) which is totally different from Techno. Spain, Italy, Portugal are Mediterranean countries that prefer slow music such as House, Blues, etc.

Thoughts?

[Mingle]

This is such an ignorant thread. I'll only comment on the <j> part.

The letter <j> was originally pronounced like the English <y> and is denoted by the IPA as /j/. So for the purpose of this thread, I'll use /j/ to denote the English <y>.

The letter <j> originally did not exist in the Latin alphabet. Its sound was represented by the letter <i> so names were spelled Ioannis ("Johannes, Johan, John"), Iesus ("Jesus"), Iacobus ("Jacob"), etc. It was originally spelled with an <i>. There were two forms of the letter <i> though and this caused confusion. One was the consonant <i> (e.g. Ioannis) and the other was the vowel <i> (e.g. little). To distinguish the two, a small hook was added to the bottom of the <i> and then this became the letter <j> (compare the shape of the letter i with the letter j). The letter <j> then became the consonant <i> whereas the letter <i> stayed to represent <i> for vowel sounds. In Romanian though, they

Anyways, the letter <j> was always pronounced /j/ in Latin and it still is in every single Eastern European language, in addition to most Western European languages. In every single Germanic language besides English, the <j> is pronounced /j/ similar to Eastern European languages. Same applies to Italian. The main Western European languages where the letter <j> is not pronounced /j/ are English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. In French and Portuguese, the letter <j> is pronounced /ʒ/ (like the <s> in pleasure). In Spanish, the letter <j> is pronounced /x/ or /h/. These languages pronounce <j> differently because of natural sound evolution. Now, there is English which pronounces the letter <j> as /dʒ/. This is not because of natural sound evolution. In fact, the letter <j> was originally pronounced /j/ in English like it currently is in Eastern European languages, Italian, and other Germanic languages. The only reason it is pronounced /dʒ/ is because of Norman French influence. Since Englishmen had trouble pronouncing /ʒ/, they started pronouncing it as /dʒ/. That is why no word descended from Old English is spelled with the letter <j>. Most English words that make the /j/ sound originally made the /g/ sound, but they were later respelled with the letter <y>. For example, the English word young was originally spelled geong. Old English words that made the /dʒ/ sound or English <j> sound were originally spelled with a <cg> and then later respelled with a <dg> e.g. bridge. All English words with the letter <j> that make the /dʒ/ sound are descended from foreign loanwords whereas native English words that make that sound are spelled with a <dg>.

Regarding the Netherlands being Central Europe, that is definitely not true. I don't even know what you map is supposed to be based on since it makes no sense. Most likely something completely unrelated to linguistics.