Posted on 08/07/2008 1:44:07 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Why do we capitalize the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule “I” appears only in English.
Consider other languages: some, like Hebrew, Arabic and Devanagari-Hindi, have no capitalized letters, and others, like Japanese, make it possible to drop pronouns altogether. The supposedly snobbish French leave all personal pronouns in the unassuming lowercase, and Germans respectfully capitalize the formal form of “you” and even, occasionally, the informal form of “you,” but would never capitalize “I.” Yet in English, the solitary “I” towers above “he,” “she,” “it” and the royal “we.” Even a gathering that includes God might not be addressed with a capitalized “you.”
The word “capitalize” comes from “capital,” meaning “head,” and is associated with importance, material wealth, assets and advantages. We have capital cities and capital ideas. We give capital punishment and accrue political, social and financial capital. And then there is capitalism, which is linked to private ownership, markets and investments. These words shore up the towering single letter that signifies us as discrete beings and connote confidence, dominance and the ambition to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
don know
Fascinating!
For purely ego-maniacal reasons, caroline.
“I” for the individual. Individual rights and responsibilities.
Its usually a mistake to read too much psychoanalysis into a point of grammar.
Generalizing from too small a detail will almost always distort more than it clarifies.
It used to be common in English also to capitalize You in general correspondence. One sees it sometimes in communications from foreigners writing English.
Because “i” looks rather pathetic.
Also appeared here http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/03/opinion/edsafire.php
Notice different title.
I sure hope she’s accomplishing more in Europe than this article shows.
So it won’t look like a little l?
Or i could be making this up.
Because English reflects the rights and glory of mankind?
We also capitalize the word God.
I’ve always said that very small things in philosophy have very large consequences in culture.
It’s just a hypothesis, but we are a culture that reveres the individual, as opposed to the collective.
I'd call it psychotic.
Though e.e. cummings may disagree.
Oh, yeah, this is important. Don’t cover the republicans in the house every day trying to get Pelosi back to call a vote, cover something as asinine as capital Is.
There are a few around here that would disagree with you. He calls it first amendment rights. While it is freedom of expression, it violates English convention. I think he’s probably from a turd world country, so it doesn’t matter to him.
I don’t know why everyone else capitalizes “I” but I know why I do.
Modern computer programs automatically turn a small “i” into a capital “I.” That can sometimes be a nuisance if you’re typing a phrase or title from a foreign language—the small “i” by itself is the masculine plural definite article in Italian, for example, and means “in” in Swedish and “and” in Polish and Croatian (as well as in Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian, if you are transliterating into the Latin alphabet).
And the point of this palaver is . . . . . ..
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