Why Is It????

Question

that when you use the letter I all by itself it is capitalized and the letter A is not when used alone... whats up with that... teacher says we can get extra creadit if we can figue it out..

Answer 1

because it is? :)

Answer 2

The use of capital I became common in late Middle English manuscripts of the late 14th and early 15th century, more than 60 years before the first book printed in English.

Linguists have a number of theories as to why it happened. One likely explanation is that it had to do with changes in pronunciation. Some have suggested that those 14th century
scribes just didn't like the look of that puny little "i" (often without
even a dot capping it) all by its lonesome out there on the page, so they used capitalization as a grammatical marker to signify that the letter was a word, and an important kind of word.

Some say it was always capitalized because it always appeared as the first word in a sentence, never stuck in the middle. And then, when it started appearing in the middle, it started getting capitalized out of convention and because people worried that it would get lost in script.

But they really don't know for sure why scribes changed from i to I.

It's odd to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized. In many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case".

Douglas Adams noted, "Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to."

I hope this helps.

Answer 3

when I is used in a sentance it refers to the person or the person doing the narritive as in a name which is always capitalised. A singular in a sentance is refering to an object


As -I was rolling past the liquoir store- I spotted -a small cat licking some milk from an abandoned tramps shoe

Answer 4

Because those two letters are words. In the case of "I", it is a pronoun, referring, of course, to yourself. This makes it equal in status to a proper noun, which, of course, are always capitalized.
The word "a" is an article, an indefinite article, making it equal to words like "the", and "an", which are never capitalized, even in titles of books, movies, etc.

Hope this helped!

Answer 5

"I" is a pronoun, specifically, first person singular, which according to english grammar rules is always capitalised. "A" is one of the two indefinite articles ("an" is the other) and articles, both definite (the) and indefinite are only capitalised at the beginning of a sentence.