Sear

I, or i, is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO
basic Latin alphabet.[1] Its name in English is i (pronounced /ˈaɪ/), plural ies.[2]
 I

Ii
(See below)

Usage

Writing system Latin script

Type Alphabetic

Language of origin Latin language

Phonetic usage [i]

[iː]
[ɨ]
[j]
[ɪ]
[ɯ]
/aɪ/
(English variations)

Unicode codepoint U+0049, U+0069

Alphabetical position 9

History

Development
 Ιι
𐌉
Ii
Time period ~-700 to present

Descendants  • Î
 • J
 • Ɉ
 • İ ı
 • Tittle
 • ꟾ
 • ꟷ
 • ᛁ
 • ᴉ

Sisters І
‫י‬
‫ي‬
‫ܝ‬
‫ی‬
ࠉ
𐎊
ዪ
Ⴢ
ⴢ
ჲ
☞
☚

Variations (See below)

Other

Other letters commonly used with i(x), ij, i(x)(y)

History
 Phoenician Etruscan Greek Latin
Egyptian hieroglyph ꜥ
Yodh I Iota I

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. This letter could
also be used to represent /i/, the close 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,
coming to be differentiated only in the 16th century.[3] The dot over the lowercase 'i' is
sometimes called a tittle. 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.

Use in writing systems

English

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.
The diphthong /aɪ/ developed from Middle English /iː/ through a series of vowel shifts. 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. Because the diphthong /aɪ/ developed from a Middle English long vowel, it is
called "long" ⟨i⟩ in traditional English grammar.

The letter ⟨i⟩ is the fifth most common letter in the English language.[4]

The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is "I", pronounced /aɪ/ and always written
with a capital letter. 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 capitalized "I" first showed up about 1250 in the northern and
midland dialects of England, according to the Chambers Dictionary of
Etymology.

Chambers 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).

Capitalizing the pronoun, Chambers explains, made it more distinct,

thus "avoiding misreading handwritten manuscripts."[5]

Other languages

Pronunciation of the name of the letter ⟨i⟩ in European 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, [i] when in a

Italian /i/
closed stressed syllable or unstressed. See Italian orthography.

Kurmanji /ɪ/ /i/ represented with ⟨î⟩

/i/ See Portuguese orthography.

Portuguese
/ai ̯/ Only in some recent loanwords.

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 dec 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

1
Also 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 English
alphabet (ASL
fingerspelling) 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 Į ́ Į ̃ Ī ī Ī ̀ ī ̀ ᶖ[10] Ỉ ỉ Ȋ ȋ Ĩ ĩ Ḭ ḭ ᶤ[10]

İ i and I ı : Latin dotted and dotless letter i ̀̇ ́̇ ̃̇ ́̇ ̃̇

 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]

 : Glottal I, used for Egyptological yod[13]

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.ht
ml) . cornell.edu. Retrieved 25 January 2015.

5. O'Conner, Patricia T.; Kellerman, Stewart (2011-08-10). "Is capitalizing "I" an ego thing?" (http://www.gram
marphobia.com/blog/2011/08/capital.html) . Grammarphobia. Retrieved 23 December 2014.

. Gordon, Arthur E. (1983). Illustrated Introduction to Latin Epigraphy (https://archive.org/details/illustrated

intro0000gord) . University of California Press. pp. 44 (https://archive.org/details/illustratedintro0000go
rd/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=PapljPXaSbwC&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."

. Svetunkov, Sergey (2012-12-14). Complex-Valued Modeling in Economics and Finance (https://books.goo

gle.com/books?id=XNqvi56BT3IC&q=In+mathematics%2C+i+represents+the+unit+imaginary+number&p
g=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=%22Identity+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" (ht
tps://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" (http
s://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://www.unic
ode.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

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "I".

Media related to I at Wikimedia Commons

The dictionary definition of I at Wiktionary

Retrieved from
"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=I&oldid=1065425531"

Last edited 3 months ago by Fram