![]() However, some schemes, such as the Turkish alphabet, have two kinds of I: dotted (İi) and dotless (Iı). The uppercase I does not have a dot ( tittle) while the lowercase i has one in most Latin-derived alphabets. In serifed typefaces, the capital form of the letter has both a baseline and a cap height serif, while the lowercase L generally has a hooked ascender and a baseline serif. In some sans serif typefaces, the uppercase letter I, 'I' may be difficult to distinguish from the lowercase letter L, 'l', the vertical bar character '|', or the digit one '1'. The capitalized "I" first showed up about 1250 in the northern and midland dialects of England, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.Ĭhambers notes, however, that the capitalized form didn't become established in the south of England "until the 1700s (although it appears sporadically before that time).Ĭapitalizing the pronoun, Chambers explains, made it more distinct, thus "avoiding misreading handwritten manuscripts." Other languages This pattern arose for basically the same reason that lowercase ⟨i⟩ acquired a dot: so it wouldn't get lost in manuscripts before the age of printing: The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is "I", pronounced / aɪ/ and always written with a capital letter. The letter ⟨i⟩ is the fifth most common letter in the English language. Because the diphthong /aɪ/ developed from a Middle English long vowel, it is called "long" ⟨i⟩ in traditional English grammar. ![]() ![]() In the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English /iː/ changed to Early Modern English /ei/, which later changed to /əi/ and finally to the Modern English diphthong /aɪ/ in General American and Received Pronunciation. The diphthong /aɪ/ developed from Middle English /iː/ through a series of vowel shifts. In Modern English spelling, ⟨i⟩ represents several different sounds, either the diphthong / aɪ/ ("long" ⟨i⟩) as in kite, the short / ɪ/ as in bill, or the ⟨ee⟩ sound / iː/ in the last syllable of machine. In the Turkish alphabet, dotted and dotless I are considered separate letters, representing a front and back vowel, respectively, and both have uppercase ('I', ' İ') and lowercase (' ı', 'i') forms. The dot over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a tittle. The modern letter ' j' originated as a variation of 'i', and both were used interchangeably for both the vowel and the consonant, coming to be differentiated only in the 16th century. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used to represent /j/ and this use persists in the languages that descended from Latin. The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota (⟨Ι, ι⟩) to represent /i/, the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. This letter could also be used to represent /i/, the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words. In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative ( /ʕ/) in Egyptian, but was reassigned to /j/ (as in English " yes") by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound. Its name in English is i (pronounced / ˈ aɪ/), plural ies. I, or i, is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. ![]()
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