OT: what's with the 'i'?

[Ian Malone]

On 31 January 2013 23:37, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:55:08 +0000
> Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Just out of interest, why do some people use the non-existent word
>> "i", not to mention other violations of capitalization rules when 1)
>> their Shift key is clearly not broken, and 2) they aren't the poet
>> e.e. cummings? I've seen a number of people do this (admittedly a tiny
>> minority) and never understood it. Do they think it's cool? Are they
>> expressing their inner rebel? Were they punished by their English
>> teacher at school? Is hitting Shift too much effort? Enquiring minds
>> want to know.
>
> Speaking of that, I never understood why is the "I" capitalized in
> English?
>
> Or, to rephrase it in your words, what's with the "I"? ;-)
>
> To begin with, I don't know of any other language which capitalizes
> this word. Also, while my English teachers were always very
> explicit that the "I" should always be capitalized, none of them has
> ever managed to give me a reasonable answer _why_ this is so.
>

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%28pronoun%29 claims there is
no known reason. However it's unusual in being a single-letter word so
the suggestions of illegibility of single letter lowercase and
accidental introduction are probably strong factors. Also remember
that *lower* case is the more recent invention,

> While I agree with you that correct spelling is something worth taking
> care of in e-mail communication, I was always wondering about the
> completely "randomized" spelling rules in English language. Or rather
> the utter absence of any real rules. In other languages, those
> rules often actually make sense, and make the language easier to read
> and write.
>
> For example, the concept of "spelling competitions" in elementary
> schools was completely foreign to me until I heard about it from English
> schoolchildren. In most other languages, knowing how to properly spell
> words does not need any advanced knowledge, and basically is not
> considered to be a skill worth competing over.
>

> But English spelling is soooo contrived that people had to invent
> spell-checkers to deal with it. :-D
>
> And let's not even start with the even more contrived problem of the
> proper *pronunciation* of the written English. ;-)
>

Actually, these two are coupled in a way that's not obvious to a
non-native speaker (and many native speakers too). English spelling
reflects pronunciation quite closely, what makes it difficult is that
many graphemes are re-used. You can hear some of this in the
difference between American and British accents where Webster's
spellings seem to correspond to changes in pronunction (sometimes
quite extreme, ax for ask). Remember most speakers learn the language
before they learn the writing system, learning foreign languages is
done backwards in a way. Also many other languages that haven't
relentlessly revised their spelling rules also make use of graphemes.
English has a lot of loan words of different origins which is a
contributing factor. If you don't believe people compete over spelling
in other languages you might want to have a look at Chinese.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk