Tamires Rocino Castino N28 2B

WHY WE CAPITALIZE THE PRONOUN I

1 Some languages capitalize several of their pronouns. Some dont capitalize any of
them. English is an odd duck in that we only capitalize the first person singular, I.
Why? Honestly, we're not sure. Linguists and historians have been unable to find any
record of a definitive explanation. We know this much: In Old and early Middle English,
the German-flavored ich was used as the personal pronoun. Around the middle period
of Middle English, personal pronouns proliferated and Ich, ich, Ic, ic, I and i were all
used in writing with varying frequency. By the end of the Middle English period, I stood
alone, tall and triumphant. The ch was dropped in one of the major phonetic changes
that English experienced during these years, but the reason the solo i suddenly got the
capital treatment is less clear. Here are some of the explanations scholars have
proposed:
Capitalization might have been a linguistic concern. When I appears, its frequently the
subject of the sentence, and may have gotten capitalized to denote its importance in a
statement.
In a similar vein, capitalization might be psychological, affirming the importance not of
the subject, but of the writer. I can confirm that we writers can be a self-obsessed bunch
sometimes, but I cant speak to the egotism of the scribes of the Middle Ages without a
time machine. One problem with this hypothesis is that, if youre going to capitalize I out
of ego, why not do the same to every appearance of me?
Another explanation is that the capital I had less to do with language and more to do
with the practicalities of handwriting. The lower case i looks a little weak on its own.
Some historians - including Charles Bigelow, a type historian and designer of the Lucida
and Wingdings font families - think that an i all by itself would have become illegible
after multiple handlings and readings of a manuscript, and scribes had to make the
pronoun graphically sturdier to stand the tests of time and smudging hands.

2 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,
. The j did not exist as a separate letter. When an was written as a separate word or
mark, as the Roman numeral /I and the pronoun /I, or when it was the last one of a
group of 's, it began to be written elongated, somewhat like a straighter (without a dot).
This elongation of the separate, single was probably done in order to avoid confusion
with punctuation marks. That of the last of a group was mostly in order to avoid

confusion between u and , between n and , and between m and , which often look
identical in manuscripts: from then on, such groups looked like and (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 without a dot looks much like a
capital Iwhich 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 or .)

3 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 simplicitys sake.