Talk:I

Should there be a note on uppercase vs lowercase of the pronoun?

• Russian Я (ya) shouldn't be linked to this page. This was a mix-up from the fact that Я translates to the pronoun "I"

In computing

I think that "i" stands for (current) iteration, which is why "i" is used as a loop counter. --Joshtek 15:54, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

I think thats part of the reason. also i believe that "i" was the first integer variable in fortran. Plugwash

You seem to be correct: http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=58108&page=1&pp=15 Joshtek

A Question

Why on earth does the "i" has a dot? I can understand the dot in Turkish, for distinguishing reasons, but how come there is the period on top also in latin and other languages, and for so many centuries? Ciacchi 16:48, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Oh, nevermind, I found it out. Ciacchi 16:06, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Phil and Jim?

Um, are Phil and Jim people we should know? If so, please expand their significance in relation to using the word "I". Otherwise, please remove this bullet point from the Meanings of I section. Thanks Apatterno 05:00, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't get it either.......... -) Dance3600#*-* (talk) 08:34, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Apple's use of the 'i'

Should there be a reference to the use of i in the market world? Such as iPod, iPhone, iRiver, iLife, iTunes etc. --Reverieuk 01:02, 13 January 2007 (UTC) icandy-pram, i agree there should be something along the lines of "....one of the few single letters which is copyrighted/trademarked...." or something, cos there seems to be a lot of "i" products around - not just apple.

When did the short i as in "bill" evolve?

When did the short i as in "bill" evolve? Does anybody know. Imhotep is the earliest name I know of with the short I sound, so maybe it is as old as written language? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by TedHuntington (talk • contribs) 22:23, 29 March 2007 (UTC).

The premise of this question seems to be wrong. We can speak about how the English came to have a short close front unrounded vowel or rather a near-close near-front unrounded vowel. I think this happened as Proto-Germanic evolved. The question, when did this sound appear in any language is un-answerable, but probably humans have been making this sound and using it in their language for as long as the language has existed and the shape of the human mouth has been in the form it is. It would thus be a lot older than written language. Stefán 23:52, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I guess that is my question: when did the short-i as in "dill" evolve in human language. We can certainly trace the short-a as in "cat", and the a in "ape" to English since no other language has them. So you are basically stating that, to your knowledge, native people still speak the short-i in "dill" when saying the most ancient words of written history, such as the name "Imhotep"? Perhaps that is about the best any human can do today for the origins of the short-i in "dill". We can say too that the letters that sound the same probably evolved together. For example, b,d,g,k,p,t are all related and l,m,n,r are all related and may have been created around the same time during evolution. TedHuntington 00:01, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

This question still seems bizarre. Firstly, I can't make out if you're asking about eg. the existence of [ɪ] specifically in "dill" etc, or in any word in any language whatsoever. Also, we cannot tell what the first spoken languages sounded like, or when did some specific speech sound first appear, but there is no reason to suspect any to be particularly new. The physical features required for speech have existed for tens of thousands of years, but historical linguistics is able to probe the past only to the time-depth of about ten thousand years with any reliability, and even that ten thousand years is a lot; it is sufficient for virtually any sound to change into any other sound.

As an aside, it doesn't hold that "no other language has the a sounds of 'ape' or 'cat'". Finnish, for instance, has the latter and it seems that it has preserved it all the way from Proto-Uralic, some 6,000 years ago at least (while its latest English incarnation is only a few centuries old). Similarly, all the vowels in "Imhotep" are English adaptations and do not reflect actual Egyptian pronunciation (which is largely unclear, but do see Egyptian language#Phonology). --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 22:03, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

We also don't know exactly how any given word was pronounced thousands of years ago (though for some features there is useful indirect evidence). English-speakers pronounce Imhotep with [ɪ] because it comes naturally to us, not because he did. —Tamfang (talk) 06:41, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Its use in Mathematics

Why is there no mention of the letter "i" as a mathematical symbol for the square root of minus 1? I put this fact on the page entitled "I" but someone has deleted it. Would the person who did that please explain why on this discussion page A.S.A.P. Paggle

Each letter has numerous uses as a symbol; they are listed at I (disambiguation) because it would be clutter to list them all in I. —Tamfang (talk) 06:44, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Hieroglyphs

Why the hell do people always put up bs "related" hierogrlyphs. The arm hieroglyph is an ayin - not related to the yodh. In fact, hieroglyphs has a related glyph - the yodh! Why isn't that there?211.30.58.23 (talk) 00:06, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Capitalisation of the letter I in the English language

Should there not be a part emphasising the strange way we capitalise the letter I in the English language when referring to ourselves? The article mentions the Turkish capital and dotted i versions, so i don't see why there isn't a section about the English differences. There's also a lot of reasoning behind it (which i still don't understand) which could be interesting to add to the article. For example, some sources ( http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxwhyisi.html ) say it's used to avoid misreading, which seems strange given the fact that a capital I commonly looks like an uncapped L(i = I - l = L). Other sources say it's akin to capitalising the first letter of a name when referring to another, such as "Tom", though this doesn't make much sense since we don't capitalise the M in me, nor the W in we. -Evaristé93 (talk) 04:28, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

This article is about the letter, not the word. Take it to I (pronoun)#Capitalization. —Tamfang (talk) 19:25, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

What is I 78.146.102.144 (talk) 02:04, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

I 84.13.46.167 (talk) 10:59, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

wiki is a lie — Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.43.174.141 (talk) 15:08, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Inverted question and exclamation marks

Not to be confused with Inverted question and exclamation marks.

The symbol is not like either of these. I suggest remove this statement. P0mbal (talk) 23:06, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

A lowercase letter "i" looks pretty similar to an inverted exclamation point "¡", especially in some fonts. —Granger (talk · contribs) 23:09, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

Agree, but the inverted question mark as used in Spanish? Don't think so.P0mbal (talk) 23:18, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

Palochka

"For the similar letter in the Cyrillic alphabet, see palochka." So a link to Palochka should be in the Disambiguation section, surely? P0mbal (talk) 23:16, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

Name of the letter

Wouldn't the name of this letter be written out as "eye", rather than just itself? --NovaBrunswick 11:09, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 5 May 2018

Add

right after

This article is about the letter of the Latin alphabet. For the pronoun, see I (pronoun). For the mathematical concept, see Imaginary unit. For the similar letter in the Cyrillic alphabet, see palochka. For other uses, see I (disambiguation).

209.52.88.173 (talk) 18:47, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

 Done L293D (☎ • ✎) 19:01, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 10 February 2019

130.193.233.251 (talk) 11:13, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. DannyS712 (talk) 18:28, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 8 November 2019

I need help on wiki?Christian boyz (talk) 20:17, 8 November 2019 (UTC) Christian boyz (talk) 20:17, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Dorsetonian (talk) 20:27, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Dotted capital I

Neither this article nor the one about Dotted I (as found in Turkish as a distinct letter) mentions the fact that capital I in France is sometimes dotted. Nor does the article on tittle mention this. Does anyone know anything about this (is it only in France where capital I is optionally dotted?)? shall I add the info? For example, see https://asterix.com/en/the-collection/albums/asterix-and-the-chieftains-daughter/ or https://asterix.com/le-nouvel-album-dasterix-sortira-le-21-octobre-2021/ or https://www.ac-rennes.fr/ouverture-d-un-enseignement-a-distance-du-breton-des-la-rentree-2021-122312 (the last being a Breton example, see pictures of the classroom walls - the other two examples being in French). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.208.199.100 (talk) 11:11, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

Do you have any examples that are not comics? Perhaps Hergé was doing this for effect, to indicate that the heroes are speaking a Breton dialect of Gaulish? Either way, we would need a reliable source (like Grand Larousse encyclopédique or the Academie Française) that recognises it formally before we could use it (examples of use are not valid citations). The fact that it is not mentioned at French orthography makes me doubt strongly that it is standard French. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 19:43, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

Remove /ai̯/ from Portuguese

I#Other_languages gives /ai̯/ as a possible value for "i" in Portuguese just because of English words like "site", which isn't seen as a native word but as an English word. Following this logic, you'd have say that /ej/ is also a value for "a" in Portuguese and all other languages that use the Latin alphabet just because of "Facebook", /h~x/ is a possible value for J just because of the Spanish name Juan, and so on and on. Please remove this from the article and leave out only the actual single native pronunciation for the letter i: /i/. -- 𠔻 (talk) 23:00, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

But are they serifs?

Typographic parts of a glyph: 1) x-height; 2) ascender line; 3) apex; 4) baseline; 5) ascender; 6) crossbar; 7) stem; 8) serif; 9) leg; 10) bowl; 11) counter; 12) collar/link/neck; 13) loop; 14) ear; 15) tie; 16) horizontal bar; 17) arm; 18) vertical bar; 19) cap height; 20) descender height.

Back when I was in school I always saw the uppercase letter "I" drawn with full length bars, of the same length as the bar at the top of the letter "T". And we were taught it that way despite not learning to draw anything with serifs. The idea that the bars on the letter are actually serifs seems to me to be arguable. 2600:1002:B035:C350:7B18:A5E9:C097:3B56 (talk) 21:19, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

(For convenience, I have attached an explanatory graphic copied from typeface anatomy.)

I was taught the same, because at school it is important to be able to distinguish between the handwritten forms of capital ⟨i⟩, little ⟨L⟩ figure ⟨1⟩ and figure ⟨7⟩. In print, it is usually obvious from context so is less critical for adult readers.

But to come back to your original question, I'm afraid we are left with "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck". The bars top and bottom of the ⟨I⟩ have the same characteristics as serifs on other letters, so they are serifs (even if the typeface is classified as sans-serif). Or at least they are until to you can find a reliable source that says otherwise. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 23:20, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Have either of you ever seen a typeface with serifs on those crossbars, as on T? —Tamfang (talk) 04:32, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Yes, good point that I think really answers the question. The little bars at the top and bottom of capital I are not serifs, they are part of the letter. If it had serifs, they would look like the one on the end of the "arm" of the E in the image above (pointer 17). (I don't recall ever noticing a 'normal' (not 'display') typeface with serifs on capital I. And many sans typefaces have bars top and bottom. See for example Times New Roman: I, Courier New: I, Verdana: I.) Consequently, I have stricken my earlier reply. . --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 10:30, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Weird, I thought my point argued the other way. —Tamfang (talk) 00:24, 30 October 2023 (UTC)