In what languages is the "I" (as in "I am") NOT capitalized?

Question

Or in what languages are they?

Answer 1

There is no other language that I have encountered anywhere in the world (and I have looked at the grammars of hundreds of languages) where the written first person singular pronoun is capitalized. Of course, this is just a feature of writing, the pronunciation of "I" is identical to the pronunciation of "i".

The capitalization of "I" in English is purely a feature of the modern world. The Old English and Middle English pronoun was "ic" (not capitalized, "c" as in "cat"). As the language changed in the 15th and 16th centuries, the "c" was lost at the end of the pronoun. This was about the same time that printing was entering England and the pronoun "i" was so small in printing that something larger was needed. So printers began using a capital "I" so that the letter would not be lost in the type setting and printing process.

LATER EDIT: To correct Bryan_Q. I haven't looked a lot at German texts so perhaps you're right. I'm a specialist in non-European languages. My point, however, was that the capitalized "I" in English is not something psychological or logical, but is an artifact of the printing press. "Ih" was not capitalized in Old High German (I don't have any Modern German texts with me right now).

And English I is NOT derived from Dutch from German. None of these forms are derived from the other. Indeed, you CANNOT derive Old English ic and Dutch ik from German because the German form has undergone the Second Germanic consonant shift and ends in "ch" NOT in "k". All three forms (English I, Dutch ik, German ich, along with Frisian and Old Saxon forms) are derived from a common ancestor form *ik in Proto-West Germanic. English forms (unless they are borrowed words) do NOT come from German, but from Proto-West Germanic (as do non-borrowed forms in German).

LATER EDIT FOR BRYAN_Q: You're wrong about German capitalizing "ich". Here are some German texts on the web: http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/?id=5&xid=1045&kapitel=1#gb_found
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/?id=5&xid=1720&kapitel=5&cHash=cf4411ba3bdonjuan4#gb_found
The second word is "ich" NOT "Ich" in the first text. In several searches for German texts, I haven't found "ich" capitalized (except as the first word of the sentence) in a single text, so whoever told you to capitalize German "ich" was wrong.

ANOTHER EDIT ABOUT GERMAN: "The German pronoun "ich" does not start with a capital letter, unlike its English equivalent "I". " This is from: http://www.utils.ex.ac.uk/german/abinitio/chap1-6.html, an on-line German grammar. So you need to correct your understanding of German "ich", Bryan_Q. I wasn't sure before, now I am--German "ich" is NOT capitalized.

Answer 2

Taivo is quite right, to my knowledge " I " is not capitalized in any
other western language than English! "I am" in German is: ich bin!


I have no knowledge of the thousands of other languages that are spoken in this world. You could probably find one language or two, where the person "I" is so highly "seen up" to that "I" has to be capitalized?

There are historical reasons for the English "I" and I refer to the ancient Roman history and how it affected Great Britain during that time and afterwards (without going to further discussions on the matter, sorry), but just to throw out something for you to bite on, how about "bad self esteem" ?

Answer 3

Unless you don't speak a European derived language, then it won't be starting with the letter "I". In German & Yiddish, it's "Ich", in Dutch it's "ik", in Italian it's "io".

In Scandinavian languages and Romance languages, the word "I" would start with the letters, j [jeg in Norwegian, j is pronounced like the letter y as in the English word "you"] or y [Spanish "yo", y is pronounced like a j in "joy"].

Chinese doesn't use an alphabet per se, so you can't capitalize or uncapitalize it. It's also the same concept when you talk about most Asian languages.

Even when most African languages use the Latin alphabet, either through the influence of English or French, into their languages, it's a sure bet, that not even in those African languages, there would be "I" spelled with a capital I.


To Taivo:
You said:
"There is no other language that I have encountered anywhere in the world (and I have looked at the grammars of hundreds of languages) where the written first person singular pronoun is capitalized."

That's partially incorrect. I don't know about Dutch, but at least in German, the word Ich is used like a title so the first letter is ALWAYS capitalized.

The English word "I" is derived from Dutch "Ik" => from German "Ich".

Answer 4

The subject pronoun for "I" is not capitalized in the Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, French, and so on). It's not capitalized in German or Irish...

It's not capitalized in Japanese (it *can't* be capitalized when traditional Japanese alphabets are used, since they contain completely different symbols... and it's not capitalized even when the Roman alphabet is used)... or Chinese... or Russian... it's not capitalized in any language that uses something other than the Roman alphabet, more or less.

English is actually quite unusual for capitalizing "I" in all positions. It's much harder to think of a language that shares this behavior, than it is to think of ones that don't.

Answer 5

The pronoun "I", referring to first person singular, is not used in any other languages that I know of. Many languages use other pronouns that are not capitalized.

Answer 6

English seems to be the only one. Where other languages capitalise a pronoun, it is almost always 'you' (usually in the polite form).

German ich, Frence moi/je, Japanese watashi, Mandarin wo, Indonesian saya/aku/gue - none of these are capitalised.

Answer 7

Bryan_Q, do you read a lot of Freud? I think the word "Ich"="ego" would count as a noun and therefore be capitalized in German (all nouns are). As a pronoun, though, it's not. "Dich" (you) sometimes is, and Sie (formal you) always is, but ich is not.

Answer 8

capitalization of the noun 'i' is pretty much unique to english, at least among spoken languages.