I
I (named i Template:IPAc-en, plural ies)[1] is the nint letter an a vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
History
| Egyptian hieroglyph Template:Unicode | Phoenician Yodh |
Etruscan I |
Greek Iota |
|---|---|---|---|
| <hiero>D36</hiero> | 
|
|
|
In Semitic, the letter mey hae originatit in a hieroglyph for an airm that representit a voiced pharyngeal fricative (Template:IPA) in Egyptian, but wis reassigned tae Template:IPA (as in Inglis "yes") bi Semites, acause thair wird for "airm" began wi that soond. This letter coud an aa be uised tae represent Template:IPA, the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign wirds.
The Greeks adoptit a fairm o this Phoenician yodh as thair letter iota (⟨Ι, ι⟩) tae represent Template:IPA, the same as in the Auld Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modren Greek), it wis an aa uised tae represent Template:IPA an this uise persists in the leids that descendit frae Latin. The modren letter 'j' wis firstly a variation o 'i', an baith wur uised interchyngeably for baith the vowel an the consonant, comin tae be differentiated anly in the 16t century. The dot ower the lawercase 'i' is whiles cried a tittle. In the Turkish alphabet, dotted an dotless I are considered separate letters, representin a front an back vowel, respectively, an baith hae uppercase ('I', 'İ') an lawercase ('ı', 'i') fairms.
In modren Inglis, 'i' represents different soonds, aither a "lang" diphthong Template:IPA as in kite, which developed frae Middlin Inglis Template:IPA efter the Great Vowel Shift o the 15t century, or the "short" Template:IPA as in bill.
Uisage
The letter 'I' is the fift maist common letter in the Inglis leid. It is an aa uised in mathematics tae denote the imaginary unit
Computin codes
- 1 An aa for encodings based on ASCII, includin the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 an Macintosh faimilies o encodins.
Ither representations
See an aa
Relatit letters an ither similar characters
- İ i an I ı : Latin dotted an dotless letter i
- І і : Cyrillic saft-dottit letter i
- И и : Cyrillic letter i
References
Freemit airtins
- ↑ Brown & Kiddle (1870) The institutes of English grammar, p. 19.
Ies is the plural of the English name of the letter; the plural of the letter itself is rendered I's, Is, i's, or is.