I

I, or i, is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the modern
I
English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.[1] Its name in

Ii
English is i (pronounced /ˈaɪ/), plural ies.[2]

Contents (See below)

History
Use in writing systems
English
Other languages
Other uses
Forms and variants
Computing codes
Other representations
Related characters Usage
Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet Writing system Latin script
Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets Type Alphabetic
See also Language of origin Latin
References language
External links Phonetic usage [i]

[iː]

[ɨ]

History [j]

[ɪ]

Phoenician
Etruscan
Greek
Latin
[ɯ]

Egyptian hieroglyph ꜥ
Yodh I Iota I
/aɪ/

(English
variations)
Unicode codepoint U+0049,
In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have originated in a U+0069
hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal
fricative (/ʕ/) in Egyptian, but was reassigned to /j/ (as in English Alphabetical position 9
"yes") by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that History
sound. This letter could also be used to represent /i/, the close Development
front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words.
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.
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 modern letter 'j' originated as a variation of 'i', and both were
used interchangeably for both the vowel and the consonant, Ιι
coming to be differentiated only in the 16th century.[3] The dot
over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a tittle. In the Turkish 𐌉
alphabet, dotted and dotless I are considered separate letters, I
representing a front and back vowel, respectively, and both have i
uppercase ('I', 'İ') and lowercase ('ı', 'i') forms.
Time period ~-700 to
Use in writing systems present
Descendants  • Î

 • J

English  • Ɉ

 • İ ı

In Modern English spelling, ⟨i⟩ represents several different  • Tittle

sounds, either the diphthong /aɪ/ ("long" ⟨i⟩) as in kite, the short
 • ꟾ

/ɪ/ as in bill, or the ⟨ee⟩ sound /iː/ in the last syllable of machine.
 • ꟷ

The diphthong /aɪ/ developed from Middle English /iː/ through a

series of vowel shifts. In the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English  • ᛁ

/iː/ changed to Early Modern English /ei/, which later changed to  • ᴉ

/əi/ and finally to the Modern English diphthong /aɪ/ in General Sisters І

American and Received Pronunciation. Because the diphthong ‫

י‬
/aɪ/ developed from a Middle English long vowel, it is called ‫
ي‬
"long" ⟨i⟩ in traditional English grammar.
‫
ܝ‬
The letter ⟨i⟩ is the fifth most common letter in the English ‫
ی‬
language.[4] ࠉ

The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is "I", ዪ

pronounced /aɪ/ and always written with a capital letter. This Ⴢ

pattern arose for basically the same reason that lowercase ⟨i⟩ ⴢ

acquired a dot: so it wouldn't get lost in manuscripts before the ჲ

age of printing:
☞

☚
The capitalized "I" first showed up about 1250 in the Variations (See
northern and midland dialects of England, according below)
to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.
Other
Chambers notes, however, that the capitalized form Other letters i(x), ij, i(x)
didn't become established in the south of England commonly used with (y)
"until the 1700s (although it appears sporadically
before that time).

Capitalizing the pronoun, Chambers explains, made it

more distinct, thus "avoiding misreading handwritten
manuscripts."[5]
Other languages

In many languages' orthographies, ⟨i⟩ is used to

represent the sound /i/ or, more rarely, /ɪ/.

Pronunciation
Language Notes
in IPA
French /i/ See French orthography.
German /ɪ/, /iː/, /i/ See German orthography.
Pronounced as long [iː] in
stressed and open syllables,
Italian /i/ [i] when in a closed stressed
syllable or unstressed. See
Italian orthography.
Kurmanji /ɪ/ /i/ represented with ⟨î⟩

/i/ See Portuguese orthography.

Portuguese Only in some recent
/ai̯ /
Pronunciation of the name of the letter ⟨i⟩ in loanwords.
European languages

Other uses
The Roman numeral I represents the number 1.[6][7] In mathematics, a lowercase "i " is used to
represent the unit imaginary number,[8] while an uppercase "I " serves to denote an identity matrix.[9]

Forms and variants

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'. 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.

The uppercase I does not have a dot (tittle) while the lowercase i has one in most Latin-derived
alphabets. However, some schemes, such as the Turkish alphabet, have two kinds of I: dotted (İi) and
dotless (Iı).

The uppercase I has two kinds of shapes, with serifs ( ) and without serifs ( ). Usually these are
considered equivalent, but they are distinguished in some extended Latin alphabet systems, such as
the 1978 version of the African reference alphabet. In that system, the former is the uppercase
counterpart of ɪ and the latter is the counterpart of 'i'.

Computing codes
 Character information

Preview I i
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I LATIN SMALL LETTER I

Encodings decimal hex decimal hex

Unicode 73 U+0049 105 U+0069
UTF-8 73 49 105 69
Numeric character reference I I i i
EBCDIC family 201 C9 137 89

ASCII1 73 49 105 69

1Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh
families of encodings

Other representations
NATO phonetic Morse code

India
  ▄ ▄ 

American
British manual Braille dots-24

Signal flag manual

Flag semaphore alphabet (BSL Unified
alphabet (ASL
fingerspelling) English Braille
fingerspelling)

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

I with diacritics: Ị ị Ĭ ĭ Î î Ǐ ǐ Ɨ ɨ Ï ï Ḯ ḯ Í í Ì ì Ȉ ȉ Į į Į́ Į̃ Ī ī Ī̀ ī̀ ᶖ[10] Ỉ ỉ Ȋ ȋ Ĩ ĩ Ḭ ḭ ᶤ[10]
İ i and I ı : Latin dotted and dotless letter i i̇̀ i̇́ i̇̃ į̇́ į̇̃
IPA-specific symbols related to I: ɪ ɨ
The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet uses various forms of the letter I:[11]

U+1D35 ᴵ MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL I

U+1D62 ᵢ LATIN SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER I
U+1D09 ᴉ LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED I
U+1D4E ᵎ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL TURNED I
 Other variations used in phonetic transcription:[10] ᵻ ᶤ ᶦ ᶧ
i : Superscript small i is used for Computer terminal graphics[12]

Ꞽ ꞽ : Glottal I, used for Egyptological yod[13]

Ɪ ɪ : Small capital I
ꟾ : Long I
ꟷ : Sideways I

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

𐤉 : Semitic letter Yodh, from which the following symbols originally derive
Ι ι: Greek letter Iota, from which the following letters derive

Ⲓ ⲓ : Coptic letter Yota

І і : Cyrillic letter soft-dotted I
𐌉 : Old Italic I, which is the ancestor of modern Latin I

ᛁ : Runic letter isaz, which probably derives from old Italic I

𐌹 : Gothic letter iiz

See also
Tittle

References
1. Not counting marginal use of 'h' to write vowel sounds.
2. Brown & Kiddle (1870) The institutes of English grammar, p. 19.

Ies is the plural of the English name of the letter; the plural of the letter itself is rendered I's, Is, i's,
or is.
3. "The Latin Alphabet" (http://mysite.du.edu/~etuttle/classics/latalph.htm). du.edu.
4. "Frequency Table" (http://www.math.cornell.edu/~mec/2003-2004/cryptography/subs/frequencies.
html). cornell.edu. Retrieved 25 January 2015.
5. O'Conner, Patricia T.; Kellerman, Stewart (2011-08-10). "Is capitalizing "I" an ego thing?" (http://w
ww.grammarphobia.com/blog/2011/08/capital.html). Grammarphobia. Retrieved 23 December
2014.
6. Gordon, Arthur E. (1983). Illustrated Introduction to Latin Epigraphy (https://archive.org/details/illu
stratedintro0000gord). University of California Press. pp. 44 (https://archive.org/details/illustratedin
tro0000gord/page/44). ISBN 9780520038981. Retrieved 3 October 2015. "roman numerals."
7. King, David A. (2001). The Ciphers of the Monks (https://books.google.com/books?id=PapljPXaS
bwC&q=roman%20numerals%20letters&pg=PA282). p. 282. ISBN 9783515076401. "In the
course of time, I, V and X became identical with three letters of the alphabet; originally, however,
they bore no relation to these letters."
8. Svetunkov, Sergey (2012-12-14). Complex-Valued Modeling in Economics and Finance (https://bo
oks.google.com/books?id=XNqvi56BT3IC&q=In+mathematics%2C+i+represents+the+unit+imagin
ary+number&pg=PA8). Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9781461458760.
 9. Boyd, Stephen; Vandenberghe, Lieven (2018). Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra: Vectors,
Matrices, and Least Squares (https://books.google.com/books?id=0IBcDwAAQBAJ&q=%22Identit
y+matrices+are+denoted+by+the+letter+I%22&pg=PA113). Cambridge University Press. p. 113.
ISBN 978-1-108-56961-3.
10. Constable, Peter (2004-04-19). "L2/04-132 Proposal to add additional phonetic characters to the
UCS" (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2004/04132-n2740-phonetic.pdf) (PDF). Unicode.
11. Everson, Michael; et al. (2002-03-20). "L2/02-141: Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the
UCS" (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2002/02141-n2419-uralic-phonetic.pdf) (PDF). Unicode.
12. Cruz, Frank da (2000-03-31). "L2/00-159: Supplemental Terminal Graphics for Unicode" (https://w
ww.unicode.org/L2/L2000/00159-ucsterminal.txt). Unicode.
13. Suignard, Michel (2017-05-09). "L2/17-076R2: Revised proposal for the encoding of an
Egyptological YOD and Ugaritic characters" (https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17076r2-n4792r2-
egyptological-yod.pdf) (PDF). Unicode.

External links
Media related to I at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of I at Wiktionary

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This page was last edited on 21 November 2021, at 14:45 (UTC).

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