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
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
of the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
, 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 The initialism IES may refer to:
Government organizations
* Indian Economic Service
* Indian Education Service, in British India
* Institute for Environment and Sustainability of the European Commission
* Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S ...
''.
History
In the
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization.
The Phoenician alpha ...
, 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
Egyptian describes something of, from, or related to Egypt.
Egyptian or Egyptians may refer to:
Nations and ethnic groups
* Egyptians, a national group in North Africa
** Egyptian culture, a complex and stable culture with thousands of years of ...
, but was reassigned to (as in English "yes") by
Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to represent , the
close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words.
The
Greeks
The Greeks or Hellenes (; el, Έλληνες, ''Éllines'' ) are an ethnic group and nation indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions, namely Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, oth ...
adopted a form of this
Phoenician ''yodh'' as their letter ''
iota
Iota (; uppercase: Ι, lowercase: ι; ) is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin alphabet, Latin I and J, the Cyrillic І (І, і), Yi (Cy ...
'' () to represent , the same as in the
Old Italic alphabet
The Old Italic scripts are a family of similar ancient writing systems used in the Italian Peninsula between about 700 and 100 BC, for various languages spoken in that time and place. The most notable member is the Etruscan alphabet, which ...
. 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
A tittle or superscript dot is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic in the form of a dot on a letter (for example, lowercase ''i'' or ''j''). The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of ''i'' and ''j'', but diacritic dots can ap ...
''. In the
Turkish alphabet
The Turkish alphabet ( tr, ) is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which (Ç, Ğ, Dotless I, I, İ, Ö, Ş and Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requ ...
,
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
Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English p ...
through a series of vowel shifts. In the
Great Vowel Shift, Middle English changed to
Early Modern English , which later changed to and finally to the Modern English diphthong in
General American
General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans. In the United States it is often perceived as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or so ...
and
Received Pronunciation
Received Pronunciation (RP) is the Accent (sociolinguistics), accent traditionally regarded as the Standard language, standard and most Prestige (sociolinguistics), prestigious form of spoken British English. For over a century, there has been ...
. 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
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...
.
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
![The Letter](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/The_Letter_%22i%22_in_Different_European_Languages.png)
In many languages' orthographies, is used to represent the sound or, more rarely, .
Other uses
The
Roman numeral
Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers are written with combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, eac ...
I represents the number
1.
In mathematics, a lowercase "" is used to represent the
unit imaginary number
The imaginary unit or unit imaginary number () is a solution to the quadratic equation x^2+1=0. Although there is no real number with this property, can be used to extend the real numbers to what are called complex numbers, using addition and ...
, while an uppercase "" serves to denote an
identity matrix
In linear algebra, the identity matrix of size n is the n\times n square matrix with ones on the main diagonal and zeros elsewhere.
Terminology and notation
The identity matrix is often denoted by I_n, or simply by I if the size is immaterial o ...
.
Forms and variants
In some
sans serif typefaces, 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
A tittle or superscript dot is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic in the form of a dot on a letter (for example, lowercase ''i'' or ''j''). The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of ''i'' and ''j'', but diacritic dots can ap ...
) while the lowercase i has one in most Latin-derived alphabets. However, some schemes, such as the
Turkish alphabet
The Turkish alphabet ( tr, ) is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which (Ç, Ğ, Dotless I, I, İ, Ö, Ş and Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requ ...
, have two kinds of I:
dotted (İi) and
dotless (Iı).
The uppercase I has two kinds of shapes, with serifs (
![I with crossbars](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/I_with_crossbars.svg)
) and without serifs (
![I without crossbars](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/I_without_crossbars.svg)
). 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
diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s:
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
In typesetting, the hook or tail is a diacritic mark attached to letters in many alphabets. In shape it looks like a hook and it can be attached below as a descender, on top as an ascender and sometimes to the side. The orientation of the hoo ...
Ỉ ỉ Ȋ ȋ Ĩ ĩ Ḭ ḭ ᶤ
Unicode has subscript and superscript, subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, Chemical equation, chemical and certain other equations to be ...
*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 ...
-specific symbols related to I:
*The
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) or Finno-Ugric transcription system is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Nesto ...
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 subscript and superscript, subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, Chemical equation, chemical and certain other equations to be ...
ᶦ
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 an ...
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 Dev ...
Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets
* :
Semitic letter
Yodh
Yodh (also spelled jodh, yod, or jod) is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Yōd /𐤉, Hebrew Yōd , Aramaic Yod , Syriac Yōḏ ܝ, and Arabic . Its sound value is in all languages for which it is used; in many lan ...
, from which the following symbols originally derive
**Ι ι:
Greek letter
Iota
Iota (; uppercase: Ι, lowercase: ι; ) is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin alphabet, Latin I and J, the Cyrillic І (І, і), Yi (Cy ...
, 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 ...
letter Yota
***І і :
Cyrillic
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = G ...
letter
soft-dotted I
***𐌉 :
Old Italic I, which is the ancestor of modern Latin I
**** :
Runic 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
A tittle or superscript dot is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic in the form of a dot on a letter (for example, lowercase ''i'' or ''j''). The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of ''i'' and ''j'', but diacritic dots can ap ...
References
External links
*
*
{{Latin script, I}
ISO basic Latin letters
Vowel letters