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Arthur Dent
Joined: 28 Mar 2007
Location: Kochu whirld
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.38 Special
Joined: 08 Jul 2009
Location: Pennsylvania
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 Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2009 8:38 am Post subject: |
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"I" is a proper noun. Proper nouns are capitalized. It is also a nominal pronoun.
"He gave the chicken to Billy's dad."
"Billy gave the chicken to Dad."
Read a different magazine. |
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Arthur Dent
Joined: 28 Mar 2007
Location: Kochu whirld
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| Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2009 11:01 am Post subject: |
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Yes, but that is not entirely the origin of the practice.
From article above:
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�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.�
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Writing the word as "i" does not affect its usage, as in "I am so hungry i could eat a bag of nails." Nor does writing it as "I." Other than when used as the numerical "I" as in Charles I, it cannot be mistaken for another word. Context likely tells the tale with any other case.
This came up in a class the other day, and at first I came up with the same explanation you provided. However it occurred to me that there may have been another reason - I guessed that it had to do with the early days of printing as well as the obvious aesthetic garishness of the shy and dotted "i" and did a search online. So far I haven't come across a better reason than what is provided in this article.
There are few single letter words - "a" being the obvious example - but "a" may be less easily lost in context and in usage, even when typesetting was in its infancy. Also, "a" is much easier on the eye on its own (I!  ) than "i."
Imagine the poor typesetter done with his day only to find missing or misplaced "i's" due to poor lighting or poor eyesight, or both. Additionally, when reading by candlelight, the larger "I" proves easier on the "I."
I remember seeing a copy of Blake's poetry inscribed on copper plates and thinking how much time and effort went into the physical creation, and not simply the words themselves. Many early texts were works of art in both thought and image, and I would guess that this also played a part in the imagery of letters themselves. This has not gone away, as we can see by the number and variety of fonts available to us with a mere click of the mouse.
Anyway, I just thought the article was interesting and that some may enjoy it. |
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CentralCali
Joined: 17 May 2007
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| Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2009 2:41 pm Post subject: |
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| The first person singular nominative pronoun is not a proper noun, it's simply a pronoun. English, just like every other written language, has its own rules for how to write the language. It's not that big an issue. |
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tacitus14
Joined: 10 Nov 2008
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| Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2009 7:47 pm Post subject: |
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"I" is definitely not a proper noun. Definitely a pronoun.
Maybe you should pick up that magazine. |
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Moldy Rutabaga
Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Location: Ansan, Korea
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| Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2009 11:04 pm Post subject: |
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The reason is not grammatical but typographical. Old and Middle English usually used ic, which descended from German ich, and it was not capitalized. When printing presses came to England most speakers had shortened the word to i. This is not a problem in speaking, but it is in printing where an i on its own could be confused with other words, particularly when a low-level typesetter was not necessarily literate. For example, past participles in late ME were often formed with i- (hast thou i-lerned?), from the German particle ge- and OE/ME ge- ie- ye-. The article doesn't list such trivia, but I'm not buying the idea that i seemed 'wimpy.'
Other European languages do not have this capitalization for the first person pronoun, or none that I know of. |
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