Language desk
< August 15	<< Jul \| August \| Sep >>	August 17 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 16

Personal pronoun "I" capitalised in English

Written English has the unusual feature that the first person singular pronoun "I" is capitalised, while none of the various other personal pronouns is, not even "me" or "my".

Is there any other language that's exactly like this? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:55, 16 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Huh, apparently English is the only language that capitalizes the first person singular pronoun at all. Source. Interesting question and fact for the day! 70.67.193.176 (talk) 19:03, 16 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I got about two sentences into that link when the New York Times informed me I had to subscribe to see the rest of it. So much for that. However, EO also has an explanation.[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:12, 16 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It's done for the same reason that the original SI requirement to represent liters as "l" in lower case was abandoned: legibility. The single lower case letter "i" as a word by itself would be too easy to misread. --76.69.116.4 (talk) 21:13, 16 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What would it be mistaken for? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:50, 16 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That statement in our I article is referenced to Is capitalising "I" an ego thing?. Alansplodge (talk) 23:01, 16 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Or maybe vice versa. And, again, what would lower case i be mistaken for? EO's explanation seems more likely. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:14, 17 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

EO says "It began to be capitalized mid-13c. to mark it as a distinct word and avoid misreading in handwritten manuscripts." Anyway, the "use of swash for distinctiveness" and "capitalization for distinctiveness" explanations are not fully mutually exclusive. As for misreading, in the blackletter alphabet style commonly used in England during the late medieval period, the letter "i" was written as a minim, while the letters "u"/"v", "n", and "m" were written as sequences of minims. Minims belonging to adjacent letters were not reliably written differently from minims within a single letter, which could sometimes lead to confusing situations. (Of course, word-spacing was often erratic during that period...) AnonMoos (talk) 00:26, 17 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe if someone's copying it but not reading it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:31, 17 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What do you mean by "but not reading it", Bugs? Are you saying that reading the text in the image at right is a trivial exercise? Deor (talk) 02:07, 17 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about that Baseballbugs - I don't have a subscription either and was allowed to read the whole thing so for all I knew it was not paywalled. Will see if I can extract some judicious quotes.

"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."

"“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.” "

"The growing “I” became prevalent in the 13th and 14th centuries, with a Geoffrey Chaucer manuscript of “The Canterbury Tales” among the first evidence of this grammatical shift."

At the end of the article, the writer speculates on a link to egotism but makes it clear that is speculation alone, and challenges the reader to write their next email using reverse capitalization--You and i--to see how it feels. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 02:34, 17 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion made me think of the practice of capitalising the third person pronouns in hard core Christian writing when it is used to refer to that faith's god - He, Him, Himself, etc. Does this happen in other languages? HiLo48 (talk) 00:00, 17 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Dunno, but even the typical Bible doesn't do that. It seems to be a non-biblical convention. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:14, 17 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There's an apocryphal story that the reason why 5-bit telegraph codes (Baudot code) were printed out in all-capitals instead of all-lowercase is that a late-19th-century telegraph corporation executive objected to the spellings "god" and "jesus" that would result from all-lowercase... AnonMoos (talk) 07:56, 17 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The Danish pronoun I ("you", plural nominative) is likewise always capitalized. It has a different pronunciation and origin from the English pronoun, so the two are homographs even in the narrow definition of the term. --Theurgist (talk) 17:08, 17 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to all for interesting info. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:30, 18 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

In Polish it is common to capitalize the second-person pronoun, but not the first-person one. This is, however, a stylistic, rather than grammatical rule. In other words, the words for "you, your, yours", etc., are capitalized to show respect to the reader, but it's still grammatically correct to leave them in lower case. — Kpalion^(talk) 10:04, 19 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In German, the honorific 2nd person pronouns are also capitalized, but I think that's mainly because they're so ambiguous: uncapitalized sie can mean "they" or "she", while capitalized Sie means "you" (not joking)... AnonMoos (talk) 11:35, 19 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

How does that work in spoken German? Context-dependent, I suppose. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:04, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, you can distinguish sie in the sense of "she" from the other two by the verb form, third-singular rather than third-plural. Sie geht is "she goes"; "sie gehen" is "they/formal you go". The Sie for formal "you" is apparently third-person plural because it stands for some locution like eure Gnaden (your mercies, your graces), where eure is the second-person plural possessive. --Trovatore (talk) 22:38, 21 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Of course it's also ambiguous between nominative and accusative (allowing English translations "she", "her", they", "them", and "you"), and verb inflections won't help in the accusative...

-- AnonMoos (talk) 07:18, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

True, and also all their possessives are ihr (with appropriate endings depending on case, gender, and number). That suggests a deeper connection between the "she" sie and the "they/You" sie than I know how to explain. The "they" and "You" ones are really identical everywhere, and this has a reasonable etymological explanation, but the connection with "she" is more obscure. Would be interested to hear from anyone who knows more. --Trovatore (talk) 18:15, 22 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]