I have been contemplating for long on why we actually write the first personal pronoun with a capital “i” and all the rest of the pronouns with low case letters. Is there a special, known reason for it? If anybody has any ideas, could you, please write me to sarlosv@gmail.com? Thanks!
Just out of curiosity, if I have any ideas, could I not just post them here?
The most likely reason is that “i” (in lower case) would have been too small a word and too difficult to read, especially in manuscripts. “I” is (as far as I know) the only case in any language where the first person singular pronoun is capitalised – and the distinction does not extend to “me”, so it’s something peculiar to “I”. Back in Middle English, when the pronoun was “ic”, or something similar, the pronoun was not capitalised. It’s only when the word shortened to one letter that this happened.
(It may also help that “I” often starts sentences, but that hasn’t affected other pronouns in the nominative case, like “he” or “we”, so that can’t be the main or only reason.)
And I’m not going to email you: if you want to find an answer, come back here and read it.
It’s often the case in languages that have evolved an uppercase/lowercase alphabetic structure that one or more pronouns will be normally written with an initial capital. In addition to English “I”, the Russian first-person pronoun /ya/ (written with the Cyrillic character resembling a mirror-image R) is generally capitalized. German and Spanish both distinguish between an intimate and a formal “you” form, and capitalize the latter (which governs a third-person verb in both cases): Sie and Usted (abbreviated Vd.) respectively. I’m fairly certain there are numerous other examples.
Here’s one scholarly-looking article:
We just do?
I wasn’t aware of the case of “Я” in Russian. It would seem to be similar to “I” in English, as a single-letter word. However, the lower-case form “я” looks very similar, and also seems to be used for the word when it doesn’t start a sentence.
The capitalised “Sie/Ihr” in German and “Usted” in Spanish would seem to be for a completely different reason, as a mark of respect for the addressee. That’s unlikely to apply to “I”, because it’s unlikely culturally to have a mark of respect like that for yourself and not for other people. In addition, if it applied to “I”, why isn’t “me” capitalised too?
I hadn’t seen the suggestion that it was connected with the change in the vowel from the short /i/ to the long diphthong /ai/. Indeed, it does look reasonable to me that it was used to mark the change in pronunciation.
I certainly found that an interesting possibility too, Giles.
Thanks for all of you, you are really helpful and great!
Why I prefer e-mailing… Sometimes it is difficult for me to log onto this site, and I needed an answer for my question quickly.
Wow, so Gitmo is asking questions about linguistic history now?
Quoting the great Staples Singers
I heard at some point that the reason for this was closely related to the origins of the ampersand and it’s symbol (&).
In short …
I (the word) was differentiated from i (the letter) by capitalizing it; as this was shorter than using the full “i per se i”, meaning “i [the symbol which] by itself [is] i”.
Why is “I” written in capital letter?
The human ego?
By the way, this is an interesting discussion.
Because I said it should be.
Homework?
Not homework… although I ( i ?? 
) consider all my studens’ questions I cannot answer as my homework. They will definitely be pleased with all the useful hints and thoughts you have given. Thanks for all!
i am not sure about the spanish part. “tu” and “usted” (abbreviated “Ud.” and capitalized as all abbreviations) can be written in lowercase. I might be proven wrong but I do not believe that there are any words that demand capitalization in spanish (other than God, of course)