I
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Look up I in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
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| Basic Latin alphabet | |||||
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | ||
| Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj |
| Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp |
| Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | |
| Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | ||
I is the ninth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its English name (pronounced /aɪ/) is spelled i.
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[edit] History
| Egyptian hieroglyph ˁ | Proto-Semitic Y | Phoenician Y | Etruscan I | Greek Iota | Old Turkic ı/i | ||
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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 (/ʕ/) in Egyptian, but was reassigned to /j/ (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 /i/, mainly in foreign words.
The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota (Ι, ι). It stood for the vowel /i/, the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used for the consonant sound of /j/. 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 /aɪ/, that developed from Middle English /iː/ after the Great Vowel Shift of the 15th century, as well as the "short", open /ɪ/ 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] See also
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: I |
[edit] References
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This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2008) |
| The Basic modern Latin alphabet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Letter I with diacritics
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646 |
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