I, or i, is the ninth
letter
Letter, letters, or literature may refer to:
Characters typeface
* Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet.
* Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...
and the third
vowel letter of the
Latin alphabet, used in the
modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is
''i'' (pronounced ), plural ''
ies''.
History
In the
Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have originated in a
hieroglyph for an arm that represented a
voiced pharyngeal fricative
The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\. Epiglotta ...
() in
Egyptian, but was reassigned to (as in English "yes") by
Semites
Semites, Semitic peoples or Semitic cultures is an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group.[close front unrounded vowel
The close front unrounded vowel, or high front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound that occurs in most spoken languages, represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet by the symbol i. It is similar to the vowel sound in the English wo ...]
, mainly in foreign words.
The
Greeks adopted a form of this
Phoenician ''yodh'' as their letter ''
iota'' () to represent , the same as in the
Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used to represent 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.
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
Spelling is a set of conventions that regulate the way of using graphemes (writing system) to represent a language in its written form. In other words, spelling is the rendering of speech sound (phoneme) into writing (grapheme). Spelling is one ...
, represents several different sounds, either the diphthong ("long" ) as in ''kite'', the short as in ''bill'', or the sound in the last syllable of ''machine''. The diphthong developed from
Middle English through a series of vowel shifts. In the
Great Vowel Shift, Middle English changed to
Early Modern English
Early Modern English or Early New English (sometimes abbreviated EModE, EMnE, or ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle ...
, which later changed to and finally to the Modern English diphthong in
General American and
Received Pronunciation. Because the diphthong developed from a Middle English long vowel, it is called "long" in traditional English grammar.
The letter is the fifth most common letter in the
English language.
The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is "I", pronounced and always written with a capital letter. This pattern arose for basically the same reason that lowercase acquired a dot: so it wouldn't get lost in manuscripts before the age of printing:
Other languages
In many languages' orthographies, is used to represent the sound or, more rarely, .
Other uses
The
Roman numeral I represents the number
1.
In mathematics, a lowercase "" is used to represent the
unit imaginary number, while an uppercase "" serves to denote an
identity matrix.
Forms and variants
In some
sans serif
In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...
typefaces
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are thousands o ...
, 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
:
1Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings
Other representations
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 Ỉ ỉ Ȋ ȋ Ĩ ĩ Ḭ ḭ ᶤ
Unicode has subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, chemical and certain other equations to be represented in plain text without using any ...
*İ i and I ı : Latin letters
dotted and
dotless I
*
IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
IPA may also refer to:
Organizations International
* Insolvency Practitioners A ...
-specific symbols related to I:
*The
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet uses various forms of the letter I:
**
**
**
**
*Other variations used in phonetic transcription:
ᵻ
The close central unrounded vowel, or high central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , namely the lower-case letter ''i'' with a hori ...
ᶤ
Unicode has subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, chemical and certain other equations to be represented in plain text without using any ...
ᶦ ᶧ 𝼚
*
i : Superscript small i is used for
Computer terminal graphics
*Ꞽ ꞽ : Glottal I, used for
Egyptological yod
*Ɪ ɪ :
Small capital I
*ꟾ :
Long I
Long i ( la, i longum or '' itterai longa''), written , is a variant of the letter i found in ancient and early medieval forms of the Latin script.
History
In inscriptions dating to the early Roman Empire, it is used frequently but inconsisten ...
*ꟷ :
Sideways I
The Sideways I ꟷ is an epigraphic variant of Latin capital letter I used in early medieval Celtic inscriptions from Wales and southwest England ( Cornwall and Devon). About 36 monumental inscriptions in Wales, and about 15 in Cornwall and De ...
Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets
* :
Semitic letter
Yodh, from which the following symbols originally derive
**Ι ι:
Greek letter
Iota, from which the following letters derive
*** :
Coptic
Coptic may refer to:
Afro-Asia
* Copts, an ethnoreligious group mainly in the area of modern Egypt but also in Sudan and Libya
* Coptic language, a Northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century
* Coptic alphabet, t ...
letter Yota
***І і :
Cyrillic
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = Gr ...
letter
soft-dotted I
***𐌉 :
Old Italic I, which is the ancestor of modern Latin I
**** :
Runic
Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...
letter isaz, which probably derives from old Italic I
*** :
Gothic
Gothic or Gothics may refer to:
People and languages
*Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes
**Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths
**Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
letter iiz
See also
*
Tittle
References
External links
*
*
{{Latin script, I}
ISO basic Latin letters
Vowel letters