On 11-04-08 13:20, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

Just idle interest -- I see the lowercase "I" more and more these
days. Is it a kiddospeak thing or is that actually finding its way
into the English language?

  just FYI, i long ago gave up on uppercase for the most part since
doing that makes a *huge* difference in avoiding carpal tunnel
syndrome.  constantly reaching for the shift keys represents a
noticeable amount of stress on the wrists.  when i stopped doing that,
it made a significant difference.  your mileage might vary, of course.
:-)

I see. It's not something one might find in professionally printed content (yet) then?

Always thought the uppercase 'I' was interesting. In Dutch, the English word 'you' is either 'jij' (*) or 'u', with 'jij' being the informal and 'u' the formal, polite, distant version. Although we don't generally do that anymore either, we used to uppercase that 'U' and it's still allowed (we have official spelling rules) to indicate "special respect", like it it is for example in a phrase such as 'Your Majesty' -- 'Uwe Majesteit'.

Obviously, not turning that fact into a "Over here, we respect others while in the English language world they only respect themselves" argument would've been a tremendous waste of language and I've always enjoyed doing such...

(*) 'Jij' is a two letter word -- that 'ij' is a Dutch 'y', resembling an 'i' and 'j' close together (this is a language fact that's starting to get lost on most Dutch as well, especially under the influence of us always having used US keyboards though).

Rene.

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