Loading ...
is it all about “I,” after all?
Our “capital-I” is one of those bizarre inconsistencies of English orthography so taken for granted it’s all but unnoticed until someone points it out.
I made the discovery thanks to Maxine Hong Kingston’s essay, “The Language of Silence.” In a quick aside Kingston notes, ” ‘I’ is capital and ‘you’ is lower-case.” And suddenly I, too, recognized the fact that had been staring me in the face all these years: “I” is capital, and “you” is lower-case. And “we” is lower-case, and “he,” and “she” and “they” and “them” and “it,” and…every pronoun except “I.”
I’ve stated my belief elsewhere that American culture places too much emphasis on the Self in comparison to other cultures. The obvious reasons are America’s much-touted “pioneer spirit,” “immigrant motivation,” and “cowboy culture.” But maybe the real cause and effect of our culture’s narcissism is its capitalized first person pronoun. (Tell me, Aussies are rugged individualists, but aren’t Brits conformists by stereotype? Well, as you’ll see, they had the lower case for a long period and we never had it.)
Our English “I” stands alone among the languages for getting such capital treatment. In French, it’s “je,” in Spanish, “yo,” in Portuguese, “eu,” in German, “ich,” in Italian, “io“. (Though Italians capitalize the formal you, “Loro” – but that’s simply to avoid confusion with “loro” for “they”).
Our custom does not come from the Anglo-Saxon. Its first person singular pronoun was “ic“, as in this line from Beowulf:
Hwæþere me gesælde þæt ic mid sweorde ofsloh
And so it came that “i” killed with my sword (l. 574)
It turns out that scribes were the probable culprits, and their reasons were not self-indulgent.
A google search revealed that just last year, Caroline Winter, writing for the New York Times‘ “On Language” column, had the very same question. In “Me, Myself, and I” (August 3, 2008), she writes, ” Why do we capitalize the word ‘I’? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule ‘I’ appears only in English.”
Winter saved me the trouble of more extensive research. It seems that as our language moved from Anglo-Saxon “ic” to Middle-English “i,” scribes thought the single letter too puny to stand alone. Winter tracked down Charles Bigelow, a type historian, who explained, “When ‘I’ shrunk to a single letter…one little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.” He also explained that a lower case, or miniscule “i,” all by its lonesome, could look like a mistake. Hand-scribed manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales already show the use of the more self-important capital letter.
Corpus Christi College, MS. 198, Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, London(?), early 15th century; decoration unfinished, retaining the scribe's instructions.
Winter feels that “I” went in the wrong direction. “[P]erhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot.”
And i have to agree. For the sake of orthographic consistency as well as the possible psychological benefits that could result, let’s go with the self-effacing lower-case “i,” the one “with a sweet little dot.” And please, no “i”s dotted with hearts or big open circles. According to handwriting analyst Fiona MacKay Young, “Dots that are drawn in a circle, or any other drawn shape, show immaturity, and a desire for attention,” and that would be contrary to the “point.”
