want to know history

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Anonymous

#205442 Sun, 12 Mar 06 03:26 PM

    hai ,
           This is sandeep. i wanted to know the history of the letter 'i' in the english language. why the letter ' i ' in english is written in capital letter only, why not in small letter as in case of only ' i ' not followed by any letter. so can u help me knowing this history......
and also tell me how is my english am i correct in explaining you the right thing that i wanted to present.....

                                                                        Thanking you,         BYE

Anonymous

Capital letters

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Nick147

#205540 Sun, 12 Mar 06 07:26 PM

Hi Sandeep, I could understand your question perfectly,

I thought this was an interesting question, so I checked my Oxford dictionary for you. It seems that I comes from Old English Ic and Old Scottish Ik. The Old German is Ih, which gives us the modern German Ich. - You will find that most basic English words are Germanic in origin because they date from the time of Old English (that is before 1000 CE). When English, German and Norse languages were all similar, being part of the same family of languages.

I don't know how the convention of writing I with a capital letter happened. I would guess it is something that came about in a later period. It would have fitted with the convention of writing proper names with an initial capital letter.

I will leave it to the etymologists among us to consider such weighty topics any further!

- Nick