History
|- bgcolor="#EEEEEE"
! Egyptian hieroglyph ! Proto-Semitic Y
! Phoenician Y
! Etruscan I
! Greek Iota
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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 "
yoke") by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used for the
vowel sound , 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, only coming to be differentiated in the
16th century.
In modern English, I represents different sounds, mainly a "long" diphthong , that 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.
Use in Germany
Some German typefaces of the
fraktur or
schwabacher types, obsolete since the end of the
Second World War, do not necessarily distinguish between the capital I and J. The same character, a 'J' with a top
serif of the
tilde form, was sometimes used for both. The minuscule i and j, however, were distinguished.
In Germany,
Roman numerals are often used for numbering. When listing things by capital letters of the alphabet, they avoid using the letter I, skipping over to J, to avoid confusion with the alternative Roman numeral numbering system. For example, in every regiment in the German Army there is what would be expressed in English as a "J company" but no "I company."
Codes for computing
{{Letter
|NATO=India
|Morse=··
|Character=I9
|Braille=⠊
}}
In
Unicode the
capital I is codepoint U+0049 and the
lowercase 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.