question: Asking as a non native speaker, what is it about different pronunciations of j as in San Jose and hallelujah and joy?
comment: I'm not a linguist, but I think it's probably due to the fact that they are all different languages. Jose is Spanish, and since the J's in Spanish are pronounced differently than in English, that's where the difference comes from. Same thing for Hallelujah, which is originally a Hebrew word. The different pronunciations of the J probably comes from how it is pronounced in it's original language rather than some secret meaning. Edit: If I'm wrong someone please correct me, I'd love to know the proper reasoning if this isnt it!
passages: In English, most commonly represents the affricate . In Old English, the phoneme was represented orthographically with and . Under the influence of Old French, which had a similar phoneme deriving from Latin , English scribes began to use (later ) to represent word-initial in Old English (for example, iest" and, later jest"), while using elsewhere (for example, "hedge"). Later, many other uses of (later ) were added in loanwords from French and other languages (e.g. "adjoin", "junta"). The first English language book to make a clear distinction between and was published in 1633. In loan words such as "raj", may represent . In some of these, including "raj", "Azerbaijan", "Taj Mahal", and "Beijing", the regular pronunciation is actually closer to the native pronunciation, making the use of an instance of a hyperforeignism. Occasionally, represents the original sound, as in "Hallelujah" and "fjord" (see Yodh for details). In words of Spanish origin, where represents the voiceless velar fricative (such as "jalapeño"), English speakers usually approximate with the voiceless glottal fricative .
   BULLET::::- J is still considered a consonantal variant of I, and I replaces J especially in formal texts word initially. The end of Early Modern English finally led to its separation as a distinct letter. In the colonial alphabet, J is used to represent /tʃ/, /tjᵊ/ and /tʲ/ in native words.brEarly Modern English 'Julius' or 'Iulius' and 'juſt' or 'iuſt' and Modern 'Julius' and 'just.'brColonial Massachusett waju and nawaj and Modern (wach8), 'mountain,' and (nuwach) , 'chief.'
   With the rise of the Reformation, reconstructions of the Tetragrammaton became popular. The Tyndale Bible was the first English translation to use the anglicized reconstruction. The modern letter "J" settled on its current English pronunciation only around 500 years ago; in Ancient Hebrew, the first consonant of the Tetragrammaton always represents a "Y" sound.
   Sj-sound
  
  The "sj"-sound ( ) is a voiceless fricative phoneme found in most dialects of the sound system of Swedish. It has a variety of realisations, whose precise phonetic characterisation is a matter of debate, but which usually feature distinct labialization. The sound is represented in Swedish orthography by a number of spellings, including the digraph from which the common Swedish name is derived, as well as , , and (before front vowels) . The sound should not be confused with the Swedish "tj"-sound , often spelled , , or (before front vowels) .
   In most present forms of the verb "být" ("to be"), namely "jsem", "jsi", "jsme", "jste" and "jsou" (i.e. all persons but the 3rd person singular "je"), the initial cluster /js/ is regularly simplified to a mere /s/. This pronunciation is considered correct and neutral when the verb is unstressed and used as an auxiliary. When stressed or used lexically, only the full /js/ pronunciation is considered correct. In casual speech, however, a few other highly frequent words commonly undergo similar simplification, namely all present forms of "jít "("to walk") beginning with /jd/ (that is "jdu", "jdeš", "jde", "jdeme", "jdete", "jdou"), the noun "jméno" ("name") and the verb "jmenovat (se)" ("to name, to ("be") call("ed")").
   In Unicode, a duplicate of 'J' for use as a special phonetic character in historical Greek linguistics is encoded in the Greek script block as ϳ (Unicode U+03F3). It is used to denote the palatal glide in the context of Greek script. It is called "Yot" in the Unicode standard, after the German name of the letter J. An uppercase version of this letter was added to the Unicode Standard at U+037F with the release of version 7.0 in June 2014.
  
  Section::::Computing codes.:Wingdings smiley issue.
   These changes have made qualitative gradation has become more complex, especially in the case of "k". In standard Finnish, "k" is the phoneme with the most possible changes. It can disappear as in "jalka" 'foot' → "jalan" 'foot-Gen', or: 
  
  j has been lost in this position in southeastern tavastian, northern bothnian and eastern dialects, resulting in kurki (crane):kuren (crane's) instead of the standard form Kurjen
   In the writing systems used for most of the languages of Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe, the letter "j" denotes the palatal approximant, as in German 'year'. That is followed by IPA although it may be counterintuitive for English speakers (words occur with this sound in a few loanwords in English like Hebrew "hallelujah" and German "Jägermeister").
  
  In grammars of Ancient Greek, the palatal approximant, which was lost early in the history of Greek, is sometimes written as (iota with the inverted breve below, the nonsyllabic diacritic or marker of a semivowel).
   The letter "j" was only relatively recently accepted into Welsh orthography for those words borrowed from English in which the sound is retained in Welsh, even where that sound is not represented by "j" in English spelling, as in ("garage") and ("fridge"). Older borrowings of English words containing resulted in the sound being pronounced and spelt in various other ways, resulting in occasional doublets such as and ("Japan").
   Lj (digraph)
  
  Lj (lj in lower case) is a letter present in some Slavic languages, such as the Latin version of Serbo-Croatian and in romanised Macedonian, where it represents a palatal lateral approximant . For example, the word "ljiljan" is pronounced . Most languages containing the letter  in the alphabet are phonemic, which means that every symbol represents one sound, and is always pronounced the same way. In this case, joining the letters "L" and "J" creates a new letter or a sound. Like its Latin counterpart, the Cyrillic alphabet has a specific symbol for the same sound: Љ.
   There are two sets of palatal sounds. "Alternating palatals" alternate with the velars , while "non-alternating palatals" do not. Note that appears twice here; these two 's behave differently, occur in different distributions, and are denoted by different letters ("g" and "j"). This suggests that they may belong to different phonemes, and that is indeed a common analysis.
   The acute accent over the vowels is ignored for purposes of alphabetization. Modern loanwords also make use of j k q v w x y z. Of these, v is the most common. It occurs in a small number of words of native origin in the language such as , and , all of which are onomatopoeic. It also occurs in a number of alternative colloquial forms such as instead of and instead of as cited in 's ("Irish–English Dictionary"). It is also the only non-traditional letter used to write foreign names and words adapted to the Irish language (for example, Switzerland, or , is Gaelicised as ; Azerbaijan, in contrast, is written rather than *). The letters j, q, w, x, y and z are used primarily in scientific terminology or direct, unaltered borrowings from English and other languages, although the phoneme does exist naturally in at least one dialect, that of West Muskerry, County Cork, as the eclipsis of s. k is the only letter not to be listed by . h, when not prefixed to an initial vowel as an aspirate in certain grammatical functions (or when not used as an indicator of lenition when Roman type is used), occurs primarily in loanwords as an initial consonant. The letters' names are spelt out thus:
   The consonantal / was sometimes used to transliterate the Hebrew letter yodh, representing the palatal approximant sound /j/ (and transliterated in Greek by iota and in Latin by ); words like "Jerusalem", "Joseph", etc. would have originally followed the Latin pronunciation beginning with /j/, that is, the sound of in "yes". In some words, however, notably from Old French, / was used for the affricate consonant , as in "joie" (modern "joy"), used in Wycliffe's Bible. This was similar to the geminate sound , which had been represented as in Old English. By the time of Modern English, the sound came to be written as / at the start of words (like "joy"), and usually as elsewhere (as in "bridge"). It could also be written, mainly in French loanwords, as , with the adoption of the soft G convention ("age", "page", etc.)
   Section::::Use in writing systems.:Other languages.:Romance languages.
  
  In the Romance languages, has generally developed from its original palatal approximant value in Latin to some kind of fricative. In French, Portuguese, Catalan, and Romanian it has been fronted to the postalveolar fricative (like in English "measure"). In Spanish, by contrast, it has been both devoiced and backed from an earlier to a present-day ~ , with the actual phonetic realization depending on the speaker's dialect/s.
   JSL differs from Hepburn particularly in that it uses doubled vowels, rather than macrons, to represent the long vowels and . Tokyo (Tōkyō) and Osaka (Ōsaka), for instance, would be written (Tookyoo) and (Oosaka) in JSL. Also, JSL represents ん, the syllabic n, as an "n" with a macron over it, (n̄), to avoid the practice that other systems use of sometimes writing (n) and sometimes (n') depending on the presence of a following vowel or (y).
   The vowel system is more elaborate than in other West African variants; Standard Liberian English distinguishes from , and from , and uses the diphthongs , , and . Vowels can be nasalized. The final vowel of "happy" is . It favors open syllables, usually omitting syllable-final , , or a fricative. The interdental fricatives appear as in syllable-initial position, and as finally. The glottal fricative is preserved, as is the voiceless labio-velar fricative (in such words as "whit" and "which" in contrast to voiced in "wit" and "wish"). Affricates have lost their stop component, thus  . Between vowels, may be flapped () as in North American English. Liquids are lost at the end of words or before consonants, making Standard Liberian English a non-rhotic dialect.
   In Konkani dialects other than Sashti Christian, the palatalised consonants occur only before the vowels a, o, and occasionally before u. In the Sashti Christian dialect, however, they also occur in the word-final position, e.g. ʋɑːt' (candle), mɑːr' (hit) second person singular imperative. Palatalised consonants contrast with unpalatalised consonant + y clusters.
  
  Section::::Phonetic details and Phoneme Distribution.:Palatalisation.:Palatalised consonants and unpalatalised consonant plus y clusters.
   Additionally, s, r, c (for [k]), j,among other phonemes are used in loan words and names. In Sambal and Ayta languages, the glottal stop tends to replace a word final non-obstruent when proceeded by a stressed high central vowel.
  
  Section::::Grammar.
   Section::::History.:Switch to Spanish and call-sign problem.
   The combination "lj" (considered two separate letters, L and J) is also common in Hungarian and is even pronounced by many speakers. However, even it is sometimes subject to the same reduction to that "ly" has been, mainly if it is at the end of a word.
  
  Section::::History.
   At the phonemic level, consonant clusters do occur, either at the start or in the middle of the word, but they are invariably broken up by the insertion of the epenthetic vowel schwa . Thus, /tre/ 'bracelet' is pronounced , /twok/ → 'they enter', /mti/ → 'evening'. This also happens when the consonant cluster is in the middle of the word between vowels (/mfokfok/ → 'they roll'), except if the first consonant of the cluster is a nasal: /nimpon/ → 'watermelon'. The epenthetic schwa can assimilate in quality to the following vowel: /mtie/ → . Those Maybrat speakers who are also fluent in Indonesian, can and do pronounce clusters of a consonant + r (which are also found in Indonesian), for example /pron/ 'bamboo' → (in contrast to , as pronounced by people who speak only Maybrat).
   In modern standard Italian spelling, only Latin words, proper nouns (such as Jesi, Letojanni, Juventus etc.) or those borrowed from foreign languages have . Until the 19th century, was used instead of in diphthongs, as a replacement for final "-ii", and in vowel groups (as in "Savoja"); this rule was quite strict for official writing. is also used to render in dialect, "e.g." . The Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello used in vowel groups in his works written in Italian; he also wrote in his native Sicilian language, which still uses the letter to represent (and sometimes also [dʒ] or [gj], depending on its environment).
   It is designed for teaching spoken Japanese, and so, it follows Japanese phonemes fairly closely. For example, different conjugations of a verb may be achieved by changing the final vowel (as in the chart on the right), thus "bear[ing] a direct relation to Japanese structure" (in Jorden's words), whereas the common Hepburn romanization may require exceptions in some cases, in order to more clearly illustrate pronunciation to native English speakers.
   Notice that they are "not" palatalized but postalveolar consonants. For example, Estonian "Nissi" (palatalized) is distinct from "nišši" (postalveolar). Palatalization is typically ignored in spelling, but some Karelian and Võro orthographies use an apostrophe (') or an acute accent (´). In Finnish and Estonian, "š" and "ž" (and in Estonian, very rarely "č") appear in loanwords and foreign proper names only and when not available, they can be substituted with 'h': 'sh' for 'š', in print.
   BULLET::::6. postvocalic k  g after back-tongue-vowels. ēk, ek, ik, īk  æj or (before "t, s") aj: kaka "cake"  kâga (SD "kage" ); eik "oak"  æj (SD "eg" ), lík "corpse"  læj (SD "lig" ), seks "six"  sajs (SD "seks" )
  
  BULLET::::7. postvocalic g  w after back-tongue vowels and j after front-tongue vowels: fogl  fâwl (SD "fugl" ), lagr "low"  lâwer (SD "lav" ), segja "say"  saja (SD "sige" ), vegr "way"  vaj (SD "vej" )
  