I
Due to technical restrictions, ı, the lowercase dotless i, redirects here.
I is the ninth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its English name (pronounced /ˈaɪ/) is spelled i; the plural, ies, is rare.
History
In Semitic, the letter Yôdh was probably originally a pictogram for an arm with hand, derived from a similar hieroglyph that had the value of a voiced pharyngeal fricative (/ʕ/) in Egyptian, but was reassigned to /j/ (as in English "yes") by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used for the vowel sound /i/, the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words.
The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota (Ι, ι). It stood for the vowel /i/, the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used for the consonant sound of /j/. The modern letter J was originally a variation of this letter, and both were interchangeably used for both the vowel and the consonant, coming to be differentiated only in the 16th century.
In modern English, I represents different sounds, mainly a "long" diphthong /aɪ/, which developed from Middle English /iː/ after the Great Vowel Shift of the 15th century, as well as the "short", open /ɪ/ as in "bill". The dot over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a tittle. In the Turkish alphabet, dotted and dotless I are considered separate letters and both have uppercase (I, İ) and lowercase (ı, i) forms. Dotted İi denotes the normal /i/ sound as in most other languages, while dotless Iı denotes a close back unrounded vowel (/ɯ/).
Codes for computing
In Unicode, the capital I is codepoint U+0049 and the lower case i is U+0069.
The ASCII code for capital I is 73 and for lowercase i is 105; or in binary 01001001 and 01101001, respectively.
The EBCDIC code for capital I is 201 and for lowercase i is 137.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "<tt>&#73;</tt>" and "<tt>&#105;</tt>" for upper and lower case, respectively.
Translation
The word "I" occurs as such in the following languages: English, Afrikaans, Alemannic, Arabic, Aragonese, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Asturian, Azeri, Min Nan, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Corsican, Welsh, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Esperanto, Basque, Persian, West Frisian, Friulian, Scottish Gaelic, Galician, Gan, Korean, Croatian, Ilokano, Icelandic, Italian, Hebrew, Georgian, Cornish, Swahili, Haitian, Latin, Latvian, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Malagasy, Mazandarani, Malay, Nahuatl, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Norman, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Quechua, Northern Sami, Saterland Frisian, Sicilian, Simple English, Slovak, Slovenian, Finnish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese, Volapük, Yiddish, Yoruba, Cantonese, Samogitian, Chinese.
Translation(s) in other languages: Belarusian: I, літара, Breton: I (lizherenn), French: I (lettre), Manx: Iuar, Macedonian: I (Латиница), Dutch: I (letter), Uzbek: I (harf), Russian: I (латиница), Serbian: I (слово латинице), Turkish: I (harf), Ukrainian: I (латиниця).
|
