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Why should we capitalize the first person pronoun 'I' even when it does not appear at the beginning of a sentence? Why is it not the case for other pronouns?

herisson
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didxga
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    "We", "us", "me" etc. are also first person pronouns but they are not capitalized. – ShreevatsaR Jan 05 '11 at 04:16
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    A good addition to my former question: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/172/is-it-ok-to-use-i-in-lowercase-or-should-you-always-use-i-uppercase – VonC Jan 05 '11 at 08:01
  • Interesting article with history and what-not: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03wwln-guestsafire-t.html – glenneroo Jan 19 '11 at 07:44
  • imho, the word "Why" needs to be dropped from the current subject of this question. i propose that it is not necessary to capitalize the English pronoun "i". Natural languages are not absolute. "to google" is here to stay, like it or not. @ShreevatsaR makes a fine point about the other first person pronouns. Much of English comes from German and in German "ich" is lower case in mid sentence. i now almost always use "i" and have done so for many months. My mother tongue is Canadian English. My rationale for my behaviour is that "i" and "l" can be confused in sans serif fonts.(continued) – gerryLowry Feb 21 '15 at 19:12
  • (continued) Since i can not control the fonts used to display my words, i deliberately use lower case "i" to represent the first person singular pronoun whenever i am writing about myself. i also use lower case "i" when i start a sentence with a word like "it". e. e. cummings, perhaps because the shift key on his typewriter was broken, wrote poems in all lower case. i carry your heart... "The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not a lawgiver", "Language in Thought and Action", s.i. hayakawa, 4th edition, p. 50 – gerryLowry Feb 21 '15 at 19:14
  • Why? Because I am more important than you... – nnnnnn Jan 27 '20 at 03:46

2 Answers2

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The pronoun I began to be 'capitalized' around the middle of the 13th century. But this was not true capitalization. Note that it was long before the printing press: all texts were in manuscript.

Before the 11th century, the letter i was normally just a short vertical line, without a dot, somewhat like ı. The j did not exist as a separate letter. When an ı was written as a separate word or mark, as the Roman numeral ı/I and the pronoun ı/I, or when it was the last one of a group of ı's, it began to be written elongated, somewhat like a straighter ȷ (without a dot). This elongation of the separate, single ı was probably done in order to avoid confusion with punctuation marks. That of the last ı of a group was mostly in order to avoid confusion between u and ıı, between n and ıı, and between m and ııı, which often look identical in manuscripts; both m and ııı could be written with and without clearly distinguishable connecting strokes. From then on, such groups of ı's looked more like ıȷ and ııȷ (without dots).

I believe that this convention of elongating the pronoun I had already been established by the time the dot was first used. Because a long ȷ without a dot looks much like a capital I—which has been written the same way since Antiquity—, it was later assumed to be a capital. (Incidentally, the dot was then usually written as a very short diagonal line above the ı or ȷ.)

From Etymonline:

The reason for writing I is ... the orthographic habit in the middle ages of using a 'long i' (that is, j or I) whenever the letter was isolated or formed the last letter of a group; the numeral 'one' was written j or I (and three iij, etc.), just as much as the pronoun. [Otto Jespersen, "Growth and Structure of the English Language," p.233]

An illustration of the problem of indistinguishable ııı, uı, m, etc.:

illustration of orthography due to which problems arose

Cedet animam meam in
te mee: dimittam adver
sum me eloquium meum loq[ua]r
in amaritudine anime mee di

[From Mechanical Snail's comment below:] By contrast, "i" (meaning "and") is not capitalized in Catalan / archaic Spanish, nor in Polish/Serbo-Croatian.

[From Janus's comment below:] Possibly related is the fact that the pronoun I in Danish (where it means ‘ye’, i.e., non-formal second person plural) is also always capitalised. The homophone i (which means ‘in’), however, is not.

Community
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Cerberus - Reinstate Monica
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    But then why is "i" (meaning "and") not capitalized in Catalan/archaic Spanish and Polish/Serbo-Croatian? – Mechanical snail Oct 11 '11 at 01:10
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    @Mech: An interesting question. Of course there was no forcing necessity that made scribes lengthen the single i in English: before the 11th century, apparently it wasn't deemed necessary. Compare u and n: these two letters were usually indistinguishable, and yet there was never a universally used diacritic (the small curve or circle above u was never universal, as far as I know). So the supposedly improved legibility of lengthened i was only one of the factors at play (I don't know the others). It's quite interesting to know that it didn't happen in any of the languages you mention. – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Oct 11 '11 at 12:14
  • Comment by user FCR: "You can find this dotless letters in unicode chartable. 
    ı - Latin small letter dotless I (U+0131) 
ȷ - Latin small letter dotless J (U+0237)"
    – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Apr 18 '13 at 15:39
  • @Cerberus why did you rollback? – kinokijuf Jan 06 '14 at 08:13
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    @kinokijuf: I'm sorry, I owed you an explanation: you had replaced some of the i's and j's with their dotless variants, which was good; but you didn't do all, and I thought might be a bit confusing. I had no time to complement your edit; I thought I'd do that later but temporarily roll it back—and then I forgot, I apologize. – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica May 12 '14 at 03:31
  • almost all font face issues are rooted in the historic printing press industry. – WIZARDELF Sep 02 '15 at 14:37
  • @xando: Well, as you can see, this happened before the printing press. – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Sep 02 '15 at 16:06
  • @Cerberus The Middle English handwritten (dotless) "ı" was a typographic variant of the dotted "i", much like the double-storey "a" and single-storey "ɑ" are not different letters, but the same letter in different fonts. The dotless "ı" in Unicode on the other hand is not a variant of "i" but a different letter with a different pronunciation. It does not exist in English, but in Turkish, where the capital version of "i" has a dot as well: "İ". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I So do not use the Unicode U+0131 to represent ME handwriting. –  Apr 29 '16 at 20:43
  • @what: I am aware of the use of the ı in Turkish and ɪ in IPA. But why shouldn't I use the character when describing the shape of a mediaeval letter if it suits the purpose? What would you propose that I should use instead? – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Apr 30 '16 at 01:19
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    @Cerberus If you want to show the form of a single letter and add that it "looks somewhat like" the Unicode dotless i, I see no problem. But you need to remember that you are (a) relying on the look of a specific font and the letter might look quite unexpectedly in another font that is installed on the machine of a user browsing this site, and (b) text on the internet is processed by automated processes like search engines or read by blind readers, both of which will find your claim that the ME "i" looks like the Turkish "ı" quite baffling. [contd.] –  Apr 30 '16 at 07:14
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    [contd.] For that reason, it is always better to use a graphic to represent specific letterforms. Also, your explanation would be more complete, if you explained that the dotless ME i could be confused with the strokes of m, n or u, because the form of these letters was different from the form we use today, too. And you might want to illustrate the problem, by showing that in ME handwriting the word "minim" looked like "ıııııııııı". Which is wrong, because the illustration lacks the connecting strokes. And what you write is beginning to be quite different from what you claim you are writing. –  Apr 30 '16 at 07:15
  • Possibly related is the fact that the pronoun I in Danish (where it means ‘ye’, i.e., non-formal second person plural) is also always capitalised. The homophone i (which means ‘in’), however, is not. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 24 '17 at 09:56
  • @what: I've changed the wording to "somewhat like ı". As to (a), I believe Stack Exchange makes you load web fonts, so it shouldn't look radically different on different computers? Even if not, it doesn't have to look exactly the same; as long as it resembles an i but without a dot, I think it isn't misleading. As to (b), I don't think an imagine would improve things for search engines or blind people? // I've added an illustration and additional explanation of the problem. – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Feb 24 '17 at 14:53
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: Added to the answer! – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Feb 24 '17 at 14:55
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For reasons of typography. Minuscule "i" just gets lost.

From the article in NY Times:

England is where the capital “I” first reared its dotless head. In Old and Middle English, when “I” was still “ic,” “ich” or some variation thereof — before phonetic changes in the spoken language led to a stripped-down written form — the first-person pronoun was not majuscule in most cases. The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries.

“Graphically, single letters are a problem,” says Charles Bigelow, a type historian and a designer of the Lucida and Wingdings font families. “They look like they broke off from a word or got lost or had some other accident.” When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Bigelow explains, “one little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.”

The growing “I” became prevalent in the 13th and 14th centuries, with a Geoffrey Chaucer manuscript of “The Canterbury Tales” among the first evidence of this grammatical shift. Initially, distinctions were made between graphic marks denoting an “I” at the beginning of a sentence versus a midphrase first-person pronoun. Yet these variations eventually fell by the wayside, leaving us with our all-purpose capital “I,” a potent change apparently made for simplicity’s sake.

Robusto
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