This might have been asked before, but my internet connection is really messed up right now so I can’t really search. Allright that being said why do we capatalize our I’s? We don’t capatalize our a’s so why our I’s? I mean maybe I get capatalizing a single I, but while do we have to capatalize I’m? Why?
And how come we don’t capatalize a word like in?
Probably for the same reason we capitalize Mom and Dad…
'Course, we only capitalize those when Mom could be replaced with {mom’s name}. What I wonder is, then, why we don’t capitalize Him or Her.
That IS a good question. I never really thought about it. Course, if you’re e. e. cummmings you don’t have to worry about any capitals…
In French, you don’t capitalize the word for “I”- “je.” Unless its at the beginning of a sentence. Personally i think using lower case "i"s is kind of unique.
It is a fairly unique thing, as far as I know. German doesn’t capatalize ‘ich.’ Which is very odd, considering every noun is capitalized, but not pronouns. I think it’s because it’s only one letter, and it refers to a person, so they decided to make it stand out more than just a stupid little lower case letter. Are there other languages where the self pronoun is only one letter?
Jman
My russian is a little rusty, but IIRC, the “backwards R” letter, “yah”, for lack of a cyrillic font, is the personal pronoun, and is always capitalized.
I guess 2 years of high school russian WAS worth it.
Other languages do capitalize some of their pronouns, but not necessarily the first person singular. German capitalizes Sie (second person formal) and Spanish capitalizes Usted and Ustedes (second person formal).
From http://www.faqs.org/faqs/alt-usage-english-faq/
(way down page)
Forgot I had that link. It covers a lot of topics - even a mention of Cecil in “The Whole Nine Yards”.