for rishab.
-udhay
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03wwln-guestsafire-t.html
On Language
Me, Myself and I
By CAROLINE WINTER
Published: August 3, 2008
Why do we capitalize the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for
doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule “I” appears only in English.
Consider other languages: some, like Hebrew, Arabic and
Devanagari-Hindi, have no capitalized letters, and others, like
Japanese, make it possible to drop pronouns altogether. The supposedly
snobbish French leave all personal pronouns in the unassuming lowercase,
and Germans respectfully capitalize the formal form of “you” and even,
occasionally, the informal form of “you,” but would never capitalize
“I.” Yet in English, the solitary “I” towers above “he,” “she,” “it” and
the royal “we.” Even a gathering that includes God might not be
addressed with a capitalized “you.”
The word “capitalize” comes from “capital,” meaning “head,” and is
associated with importance, material wealth, assets and advantages. We
have capital cities and capital ideas. We give capital punishment and
accrue political, social and financial capital. And then there is
capitalism, which is linked to private ownership, markets and
investments. These words shore up the towering single letter that
signifies us as discrete beings and connote confidence, dominance and
the ambition to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
England is where the capital “I” first reared its dotless head. In Old
and Middle English, when “I” was still “ic,” “ich” or some variation
thereof — before phonetic changes in the spoken language led to a
stripped-down written form — the first-person pronoun was not majuscule
in most cases. The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the
capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single
letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and
typography played a major role in shaping the national character of
English-speaking countries.
“Graphically, single letters are a problem,” says Charles Bigelow, a
type historian and a designer of the Lucida and Wingdings font families.
“They look like they broke off from a word or got lost or had some other
accident.” When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Bigelow explains, “one
little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy,
graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made
it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.”
The growing “I” became prevalent in the 13th and 14th centuries, with a
Geoffrey Chaucer manuscript of “The Canterbury Tales” among the first
evidence of this grammatical shift. Initially, distinctions were made
between graphic marks denoting an “I” at the beginning of a sentence
versus a midphrase first-person pronoun. Yet these variations eventually
fell by the wayside, leaving us with our all-purpose capital “I,” a
potent change apparently made for simplicity’s sake.
In following centuries, Britain and the United States thrived as world
powers, and English became the second-most-common language in the world,
following Mandarin. Meanwhile, the origin, meaning and consequences of
our capitalized “I” went largely unchanged, with few exceptions.
One divergence stems from the Rastafarians, who intentionally developed
a dialect of Jamaican Creole in order to break culturally from the
English-speaking imperialists who once enslaved them. Their phrase “I
and I” can be used in place of “I,” “we” or Rastafarians as a group, but
generally expresses the oneness of the speaker with God and all people.
“I and I” is thus, in some ways, a conscious deviation — really the
exact opposite of the English ego-centered capital “I.”
Not long ago, certain presidential candidates could have used a bit of
the “I and I” spirit. At the close of the primary season, the news media
scrutinized Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama’s use
of the first-person pronoun, the implication being that a string of “I”
’s signifies ungracious self-inflation. On the last day of voting,
Clinton led the pack with 64 “I” ’s and McCain followed with 60. Obama’s
“I” count lagged at 30, and he was the only candidate whose combined
“we” ’s (37) and “you” ’s (16) outnumbered his “I” ’s. These were spoken
pronouns, but, of course, our understanding and use of language is
informed by the printed word.
So what effect has capitalizing “I” but not “you” — or any other pronoun
— had on English speakers? It’s impossible to know, but perhaps our
individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community
and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of
ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot. There have, of course,
been plenty of rich and dominant cultures throughout history that have
gotten by just fine without capitalizing the first-person pronoun or
ever writing it down at all. There have also been cultures that
committed atrocities even while capitalizing “you.”
Still, there seems to be something to it all. Modern e-mail culture has
shown that many English speakers feel perfectly comfortable dismissing
all uses of capitalization — and even correct spelling, for that matter.
But take this a step further: i suggest that You try, as an experiment,
to capitalize those whom You address while leaving yourselves in the
lowercase. It may be a humbling experience. It was for me.
Caroline Winter, a 2008 Fulbright scholar, is a Brooklyn-based writer.
William Safire is on vacation.
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
