# I and i

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-and-i/58986>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [March 22, 2001, 12:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-and-i/58986 "2001-03-22T12:01:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Universal\_Dialect](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/dfb087/32.png) [@Universal\_Dialect](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Universal_Dialect)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2001, 12:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-and-i/58986/1 "2001-03-22T12:01:03Z")

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What caused people to write the i in a sentence as an upper case?

for example: My dad thinks \*\* I \*\* spend too much time on the computer.

If this is because it is a noun, wouldn’t “we” or “you” ultimately become capitals?

Regards,  
UD

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**Author:** ![Evnglion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f04885/32.png) [@Evnglion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evnglion)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2001, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-and-i/58986/2 "2001-03-22T12:18:27Z")

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because I is proper…we isn’t

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**Author:** ![Ice\_Wolf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/dfb087/32.png) [@Ice\_Wolf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ice_Wolf)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2001, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-and-i/58986/3 "2001-03-22T12:20:52Z")

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A bit hard wading through all the professorial stuff on this topic, but this site was interesting if wordy. [http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/9/9-253.html](http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/9/9-253.html)

> [@](#):
>
> perhaps, as some have suggested, those 14th century  
> scribes just didn’t like the look of that puny little “i” (often without even a dot capping it) all by its lonesome out there on the page, so they used capitalization as a grammatical marker to signify that the letter was a word, and an important kind of word. (We don’t need to  
> speculate on the egotism of the English. It’s enough to acknowledge the grammatical importance of the nominative singular pronoun as compared to, say, the indefinite article ‘a’.) Here, the scribes would be employing  
> another use of orthography, to mark a word class in a special circumstance.

Anyway, you could join the “small letter first person pronoun” rebellions. I saw two of them at least while searching through Google.

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**Author:** ![AWB](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/bb73d2/32.png) [@AWB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AWB)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2001, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-and-i/58986/4 "2001-03-22T12:55:25Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Universal Dialect \*  
> **What caused people to write the i in a sentence as an upper case?**

My 2nd grade teacher. :D:D

My best WAG is the same as Evnglion’s: “I” is proper, i.e., it represents a specific person.

It’s strange, because the basis for English pronouns is German, and their pronouns are only capitalized if they’re at the beginning of a sentence. OTOH, they capitalize _all_ nouns. _ **shrug** _

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**Author:** ![Tretiak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a88e57/32.png) [@Tretiak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tretiak)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2001, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-and-i/58986/5 "2001-03-22T15:54:08Z")

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What are you guys talking about?

Sincerely,  
e. e. cummings