Word Stories: I

February 09, 2015 10:00

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Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

A loyal reader of the column, Ian Garriock, writes:

I have a question for you which I have been asked by a number of students. Why is the first person pronoun ‘I’ written with a capital letter? It seems to be unique in this respect in the European languages. Do you know a reason for this? Is it due to British imperialist arrogance, as one student suggested to me?

Far be it from me to comment on whether the use of a capital for the first person pronoun impelled the British to build an empire on which the sun never set, but the question is a good one. And the answer starts with Hebrew.

In the Hebrew alphabet, there was (and still is) a letter called yod, which stood for a consonantal y sound, as in ‘yellow’. In form, this letter was a short upright line. The Greeks, who had no y sound, adopted it to represent a vowel sound in the form of the letter iota. This eventually became the Latin i – although without the dot, whose absence you’ll have to imagine because I don’t think I can print an i without a dot. The dot didn’t appear until Latin manuscripts of the eleventh century, when it began to be used to distinguish i from adjacent letters with similar strokes, such as m, n and u. In Latin, i represented both the consonant and the vowel, y and i (long and short). This y sound developed in English into a j sound (compare Iupiter in Latin and Jupiter in English, for example), but was still represented by the letter i until around 1630, when j became the accepted form for the consonant sound. The letter j developed from scribes giving a flourish to i at the end of words.

The Old English first person pronoun was ic, in Middle English ic or ik in the north and ich (pronounced like itch) in the south and midlands. In the north and the midlands, the final consonant was usually dropped before a consonant by the twelfth century, with the dominant form after about 1400 being i or I. The old ich form survived in dialects in some parts of the south into the first half of the nineteenth century.

So, when printing developed in the mid-fifteenth century, the situation in English manuscripts was quite mixed: i’s with dots, i’s without dots, i’s that look like j’s, with and without dots, some people spelling the first person pronoun ic, ik, yk, ych, y or Y. As with many other things, it was William Caxton (the pioneer printer) and his successors who imposed a de facto standard, I.

If there are any aspects of English words you've always wondered about, drop me a line at [email protected] and I'll see if I can come up with an answer.

Тема: Grammar & Vocabulary Теги: Wordstory, Etymology

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