I, Part II

Last year on the HaggardHawks blog, we looked at why the lower-case letter i—and its alphabetical cousin j, for that matter—has a dot above it. Turns out it had something to do with stopping intelligent people being mistaken for their knees. But this week in our noticeably infrequent series of Questions About The Language You Never Even Thought About, we’re posing another I-related conundrum: why do we capitalize the pronoun I?

After all, none of the other English pronouns—including all the other first person pronouns, like me, mine, my and myself—is capitalized, unless you happen to be God or He Who Should Not Be Named. Nor was I’s ancestor, the Old English word ic, written with an uppercase letter. And the translated equivalent of I in most other languages is usually left in lowercase, like the French je, Spanish yo, Italian io, and German ich.

Speaking of German, it of course capitalizes all of its nouns, like Mann and Frau, Apfel and Orange, Kapitalbuchstaben and Kleinbuchstaben. That’s something that English reserves only for its proper nouns (John Smith, Australia, the Cabinet, Sister Act), unless you happen to have some kind of point-making rhetorical effect in mind, as in “He doesn’t just think he’s the bee’s knees, he thinks he’s The Bee’s Knees”.

German does however capitalize the formal form of its second person pronoun, Sie, “you”, along with all its derivate case forms like Ihr, “your”. That’s part of a linguistic phenomenon known as the T-V Distinction, which has nothing to do with how much better than terrestrial television Netflix is, but rather the way in which some languages like to show polite respect by altering the pronouns used to refer to people you don’t know very well or hold in high regard. It’s the same reason why French speakers will politely ask you to respondez s’il vous plaît, unless they know you particularly well (in which case résponds s’il te plaît will do just fine). Same goes for voulez-vous coucher avec moi, çe soir, but you really shouldn’t be saying that to someone you don’t hold in high regard.

So is this what’s happening in English? Do we think so highly of ourselves that we’ve grown accustomed to capitalizing our first person pronoun? Some etymologists have suggested so, and have even theorized that there’s a latently egocentric, psychological reason behind uppercase I. But if that’s the case, why hasn’t that filtered down to the likes of me and myself, or we and ourselves? And why is it only English speakers who are self-centred enough to capitalize ourselves while other languages are not? Don’t answer that.

So perhaps there’s something more pragmatic going on. An alternative theory claims that because the pronoun I occurs so frequently in sentence-first position, it’s only natural that it would eventually become capitalized. It’s a plausible idea, but does I really occur enough times in sentence-initial position to permanently alter its form in every other context? And again, why hasn’t the same thing happened to all the other pronouns?

Instead the most likely explanation of how we ended up with capital I is a surprisingly practical one, instigated by the fact that around the time capital-I first began to appear in English texts—in the Middle English period, roughly 700-800 years ago, so Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales provides much of its early evidence—there was a phonological change also taking place.

At that time, many dialects of English were busy reducing the Old English word for I—ic or ich, which was pronounced a bit like “itch” but without the T—to a single “i” sound, making the Cs and Hs normally used to spell it no longer necessary. In written English, however, a single lowercase letter i can look a little lost on its own, and in a densely handwritten document it’s easy to imagine just how easily a solitary pint-sized stroke, even with or without its dot, might be misread, overlooked, or even dismissed as a smudge or dash.

As a result, early Middle English scribes began making their single letter Is a little bigger, so that they could stand a little prouder and little more robust on the line of text. And over time, that became the standard and gave us the pronoun capital I. And that’s The Truth—or at least, the Best Theory We Have.

Immemorial

The other day, we tweeted this:

The legal term TIME IMMEMORIAL originally strictly referred to any event occurring before 6 July 1189.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) June 6, 2015

Frankly, it sounds made up:

@HaggardHawks - really truly??? I want to believe, but...

— MmeBlahblatsky (@MmeBlahblatsky) June 7, 2015

But, in fact, this bizarre quirk of legal terminology is entirely true.

The word immemorial literally means “unrememberable”, or “beyond memory”. Although it’s occasionally found on its own (Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Princess, for one), by and large it’s now considered an example of a “fossil” word—an archaism that only survives in the language in one solitary fixed expression or cliché, like the beck of “beck and call”, the kith of “kith and kin”, or the riddance of “good riddance”. (Shameless plug: there’s more on that in the book.)

The sole expression this particular fossil finds itself embedded in dates back a little over 400 years: the OED has unearthed the earliest record of time immemorial in a document drawn up by Richard Cosin, a sixteenth century ecclesiastical lawyer, in 1593. But the legal concept of time immemorial—referring to a time beyond legal memory, which can be used to establish long-term rights of ownership—dates back considerably further than that.

During his 35 year reign from 1272-1307, Edward I oversaw the institution of three so-called Statutes of Westminster, a set of formal legal documents that attempted to codify all the laws of England and thereby establish a new and fully comprehensive English legal system. Ironically, the foundations of this fully comprehensive English legal system were written in French—or rather Old French—which, two centuries after the Norman Conquest, was still the language of the law and government in England.

Edward I: Hammer of the Scots. Holder of the Long Thin Stick.

The First Statute was drawn up in 1275, and comprised a total of 51 clauses or “chapters”, each of which set out various rules, writs, laws, and legal definitions. Clause 4, for instance, outlined the legality surrounding shipwrecks:

On a wreck of the sea, it is agreed that when a man, a dog, or a cat escapes alive from a ship, neither the ship nor the boat nor anything that was in them shall be adjudged a wreck.

Clause 5, The Freedom of Election Act, is still in force in England and Wales, seven centuries later:

Because elections ought to be free, the king forbids … any man, great or otherwise, to interfere by force of arms or by malicious conduct with the making of a free election.

Clause 34 outlawed slander:

Because many [people] have often invented and told lying tales … it is forbidden … for anyone henceforward to be so bold as to utter or repeat false news or fabrications whence any discord, or intention of discord or slander could arise between the king and his people.

And Clause 39, known as “The Limitation of Prescription Act”, set out to define a standardized cut-off point for legal ownership—a precise date against which all grievances over ownership of land or property could be measured and determined:

No one is to be given a hearing to claim seisin [feudal ownership of land] by an ancestor of his further back than the time of King Richard, uncle of King Henry, the father of the present king.

Effectively, this meant that if you had your ownership of a given property or plot of land challenged by writ of right, all you had to do to quash the challenge was prove that you and your ancestors had maintained ownership of said property since before Richard I became king. The First Statute of Westminster ultimately established the date of Richard’s ascendancy—6 July 1189—as the cut off point for living memory, or the time “whereof the memory of Man runneth not to the contrary”. Anything that occurred before that date was thereby deemed to be beyond living memory, or, in legal parlance at least, time immemorial.

This definition remained in force in England and Wales right through to 1832, when it was finally figured out that being compelled to demonstrate ancestral ownership of something for 643 years could prove somewhat tricky. As a result, shortly before his death, William IV passed The Prescription Act that shortened the legally required length of ownership or use of a contested property to anything between 20 and 60 years, depending on its use. 

This remains the standard requirement for disputes of ownership in England and Wales, and consigned the legal definition of time immemorial to the history books. Although the phrase itself—albeit a fossilized one—still lives on.
  

I

Earlier on today, we tweeted this:

The dot over a lower case i or j is called a TITTLE.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) April 24, 2015

It’s always nice to discover words for things you didn’t realise have names (we’re looking at you vartiwell, piqûre and manicule), and tittle undoubtedly falls into that category. But this great little fact raises a great little question: why do we even bother to put a dot over the letters i and j at all? 

Actually, the second part of that question is much easier to answer than the first: J is just a modification of the considerably older letter I, and probably first emerged as a means of signalling the last figure in a row of Roman numerals—so 18 might once have been written “xviij”, 28 as “xxviij”, and so on. And because lower-case i had a dot, so did lower-case j. (Shameless plug: there’s more on that in our new book.) 

Roman numerals: XI and they know it

Eventually J was used enough in written language to warrant its own place in the alphabet and ultimately to earn its own distinct sound—more often than not, in English at least, the voiced palato-alveolar affricate, /dʒ/, the j sound in words like jump, judge and janitor. But the fact that I and J were historically intertwined was enough for dictionaries as recently as the eighteenth century to continue lumping their I-words and J-words together. And it’s also the reason why Indiana Jones misspells “Jehovah” in The Last Crusade. What a film that was. Is it too late to make Marcus Brody the official mascot of HaggardHawks? It is? But we digress. 

So. If j has a dot because i has a dot, how did i get its dot?

Well, when distinct lower-case letters first began to appear more than 1000 years ago, they were typically just smaller, slightly simplified versions of their upper-case equivalents. This meant that lower-case i originally didn’t have a dot above it, because upper case I didn’t have one either. Instead, it was just a single, small vertical stroke: ı. 

This wouldn’t ordinarily have been a problem, except at the time a great deal of written language was still being written in Latin—and because of that, an unexpected snag began to emerge. 

Take a Latin word like foci, the plural of focus. Spell that with a dotless ı and it’s still perfectly legible, focı. But take a word like genii, the plural of genius—or for that matter radii, the plural of radius (or, according to Toyota at least, Prii, the plural of Prius). Change their two consecutive i’s to dotless ı and you’re left with genıı. Still legible? Well, maybe so in a nice, tidy, computer-generated typeface, but try to imagine it in handwritten cursive script, something along the lines of:

genıı

Suddenly these two ı’s become almost indistinguishable from a lower-case u:

genu

(which has the unfortunate added consequence of being the Latin word for “knee”, not the Latin word for “intelligent people”.) Ultimately, Latin scholars faced a problem: the ii combination, which turns up fairly frequently in Latin vocabulary, could easily be misinterpreted in these newly-emerging lower-case letters. So to ensure that their texts were legible, something had to be done—and that’s where the tittle came in.

Not long after the Norman Conquest, writers and scholars began adding tiny dots or strokes above lower-case i (and hence lower-case j) to show, without doubt, that it was a separate character, independent from those around it. Eventually this simple and ingenious solution became standard practice, and, like all the best solutions, has remained in place ever since.