| I | |
| Letter: | I i |
| Script: | Latin script |
| Type: | Alphabet |
| Typedesc: | ic |
| Language: | Latin language |
| Unicode: | U+0049, U+0069 |
| Alphanumber: | 9 |
| Fam1: | |
| Fam7: | Ιι |
| Usageperiod: | ~−700 to present |
| Associates: | i(x), ij, i(x)(y) |
| Direction: | Left-to-right |
I, or i, is the ninth letter 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.[1]
In English, the name of the letter is the "long I" sound, pronounced . In most other languages, its name matches the letter's pronunciation in open syllables.
In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative (pronounced as //ʕ//) in Egyptian, but was reassigned to pronounced as //j// (as in English "yes") by Semites because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to represent pronounced as //i//, the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words.
The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota to represent pronounced as //i//, the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used to represent pronounced as //j// 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.[2]
In some sans serif typefaces, the uppercase (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 dot over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a tittle. The uppercase I does not have a dot, while the lowercase 'i' does in most Latin-derived alphabets. The dot can be considered optional and is usually removed when applying other diacritics. However, some schemes, such as the Turkish alphabet, have two kinds of I: dotted and dotless. In Turkish, dotted İ 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.
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'.
| (Pinyin) | pronounced as /link/ |
|---|---|
| English | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as //aɪ//, pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/, pronounced as //aɪə//, pronounced as /link/ |
| Esperanto | pronounced as /link/ |
| French | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ |
| German | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ |
| Italian | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ |
| Kurmanji (Hawar) | pronounced as /link/ |
| pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ | |
| Spanish | pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/ |
| Turkish | pronounced as /link/ for dotless (I, ı) |
| pronounced as /link/ for dotted (İ, i) |
In Modern English spelling, (i) represents several different sounds, either the diphthong ("long" (i)) as in kite, the short as in bill, or the (ee) sound in the last syllable of machine. The diphthong pronounced as //aɪ// developed from Middle English pronounced as //iː// through a series of vowel shifts. In the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English pronounced as //iː// changed to Early Modern English pronounced as //ei//, which later changed to pronounced as //əi// and finally to the Modern English diphthong pronounced as //aɪ// in General American and Received Pronunciation. Because the diphthong pronounced as //aɪ// developed from a Middle English long vowel, it is called "long" (i) in traditional English grammar.
The letter (i) is the fifth most common letter in the English language.[3]
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 (i) acquired a dot: so it wouldn't get lost in manuscripts before the age of printing:
In many languages' orthographies, (i) is used to represent the sound pronounced as //i// or, more rarely, pronounced as //ɪ//.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, (IPA|i) represents the close front unrounded vowel. The small caps (IPA|ɪ) represents the near-close near-front unrounded vowel.
See main article: article and I (disambiguation).
See also: Dotted and dotless I in computing.
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.