{"id":13239,"date":"2016-12-01T14:31:26","date_gmt":"2016-12-01T13:31:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=13239"},"modified":"2016-12-01T14:31:26","modified_gmt":"2016-12-01T13:31:26","slug":"why-is-it-i-and-not-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=13239","title":{"rendered":"Why is it I and not i?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/blog\/capitalization.gif\" width=\"208\" height=\"208\" style=\"float:right; margin:0 0 20px 50px;\" alt=\"\u0131 \u0131 I - an illustration of how the first person pronoun in English got stretched\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Have you ever wondered why the first person pronoun in English (I) is always written as a capital letter? <\/p>\n<p>I was asked about this the other day and though I would investigate.<\/p>\n<p>According to a blog post on <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.dictionary.com\/whycapitali\/\">Dictionary.com<\/a>, it came about as a bit of an accident. In Old and Middle English the equivalent of I was <em>\u0131c<\/em> [i\u02a7], which was written uncapitalized. Its pronouncation changed over time and the c disappeared. On its own the \u0131 looked weak, so scribes started writing it a bit taller, and by the 14th century is was typically capitalized. <\/p>\n<p>According to a post on <a href=\"http:\/\/english.stackexchange.com\/questions\/7986\/why-should-the-first-person-pronoun-i-always-be-capitalized\">English Language &#038; Usage<\/a>, i was originally written without a dot as \u0131. It started to be written as slightly elongated when on its own or in Roman numerals when the last of several \u0131&#8217;s. This might have been to avoid confusion with punctuation marks, or with u, n or m.<\/p>\n<p>A dot, or tittle, started to be used in manuscripts during the 11th century to distinguish i and j from other letters. Originally it was larger, but shrunk over time.<\/p>\n<p>More information: <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.dictionary.com\/tittle\/\">http:\/\/blog.dictionary.com\/tittle\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever wondered why the first person pronoun in English (I) is always written as a capital letter? I was asked about this the other day and though I would investigate. According to a blog post on Dictionary.com, it came about as a bit of an accident. In Old and Middle English the equivalent [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}