I is the ninth
letter of the
basic modern Latin alphabet. Its
English name () is spelled
i, or rarely "ie"; 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 () in
Egyptian, but was reassigned to (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 , 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 , the same as in the
Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used for the consonant sound of . 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 , which developed from Middle English after the
Great Vowel Shift of the 15th century, as well as the "short", open 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 sound as in most other languages, while dotless Iı denotes a
close back unrounded vowel ().
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 "
I" and "
i" for upper and lower case, respectively.
See also
