- The lowercase "i" redirects here. This article is about a letter. For other uses, see I (disambiguation).
- ''Due to MediaWiki's uppercase algorithm, ı, the lowercase dotless i, redirects here.
The letter I is the ninth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its English name is pronounced .
History
| Egyptian hieroglyph
| Proto-Semitic Y
| Phoenician Y
| Etruscan I
| Greek Iota
| -
| D36
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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 in Egyptian, but was reassigned to /j/ (pronounced as English Y in "yoke") 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 /ai/, that developed from /i:/ during the Great vowel shift of the 15th century, as well as the "short", open /I/ 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.
Codes for computing
In Unicode the capital I is codepoint U+0049 and the lowercase i is U+0069.
The ASCII code for capital I is 73 and for lowercase i is 105; or in binary 01001001 and 01101001, correspondingly.
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.
Meanings for I
- In astronomy, i stands for the orbital inclination.
- In biochemistry, I is the symbol for isoleucine.
- In chemistry, I is the symbol for iodine.
- In computing,
<i> is a deprecated HTML tag for marking italic type.
- In English, I is the nominative case of the pronoun denoting the first person, singular. See I.
- In Economics, I stands for investment.
- In international licence plate codes, I stands for Italy.
- In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the letter I appears in three forms; its lowercase version, /i/, refers to the close front unrounded vowel; its barred version, , stands for the close central unrounded vowel; and its small capital version, , represents the near-close near-front unrounded vowel.
- In mathematics,
- In physics and electronic engineering:
- I is used as the symbol representing moment of inertia.
- I is often the variable for electric current. Sometimes both I and i are used for static and small signal respectively. Therefore the imaginary unit is represented by j instead.
- In QAM modulation schemes, I is used to refer to the in-phase communications channel.
- In the YIQ colorspace commonly used with the NTSC television encoding scheme, I is the color-difference channel which is in-phase with the subcarrier.
- In programming, i is often used as a generic index variable for looping constructs.
- In radiocommunication, I is the ITU prefix allocated to Italy.
- In Roman numerals, I denotes the number 1 (there are also separate Unicode characters for this number, 0x2160 "Ⅰ" and 0x2170 "ⅰ").
- In structural engineering I is used for the moment of inertia
- In music,
- In television, i is the television network formerly known as PAX
Use in Germany
In Germany,
Roman numerals are often used for numbering. When listing things by capital letters of the alphabet, they avoid using the letter I, skipping over to J, to avoid confusion with the alternative Roman numberal numbering system. For example, in every regiment in the German Army there is what would be expressed in English as a "J company" but no "I company."
See also
Ì, Í, Î, Ï, Ĭ, İ,
Turkish dotted and dotless I
Latin letters | Vowel letters
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