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	Proto-Semitic Y	Phoenician Y	Etruscan I	Greek Iota	Old Turkic i/i
	I
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	Topics I Topic Home I is the ninth letter Letter (alphabet) A letter is an element in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Each letter in the written language is usually associated with one phoneme in the spoken form of the language.... of the Latin alphabet Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin.... . Its English English language English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa... name is i . le class="wikitable">
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In Semitic

Semitic

In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages....
, the letter Yôdh was probably originally a pictogram

Pictogram

A Pictograph is a pictorial representation of an object. Earliest examples of pictographs include ancient or prehistoric drawings or paintings found on rock walls....
for an arm with hand, derived from a similar hieroglyph that had the value of a voiced pharyngeal fricative

Voiced pharyngeal fricative

The voiced pharyngeal approximant/fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents it is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?....
in Egyptian, but was reassigned to (as in English "yes") by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound.

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History

	Proto-Semitic Y	Phoenician Y	Etruscan I	Greek Iota	Old Turkic i/i
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In Semitic

Semitic

Pictogram

Voiced pharyngeal fricative

Letter (alphabet)

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis....
sound , mainly in foreign words.

The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota
Iota

Iota is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 10. It was derived from the Phoenician alphabet Yodh ....
(?, ?). It stood for the vowel , the same as in the Old Italic alphabet

Old Italic alphabet

Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages....
. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used for the consonant sound of . The modern letter J

J or j is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar fricative , and is equivalent to the voiced postalveolar fricative, , or the voiced retroflex fricative, ....
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 , that developed from Middle English after the Great Vowel Shift

Great Vowel Shift

The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in the south of England between 1200 and 1600....
of the 15th century, as well as the "short", open as in "bill". The dot over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a tittle
Tittle

A tittle is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j. The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of i and j, but dot s can appear over other letters in various languages....
. In the Turkish alphabet

Turkish alphabet

The Turkish alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, a certain number of which have been adapted or modified for the phonetic requirements of the language....
, dotted and dotless I are considered separate letters and both have uppercase (I, I) and lowercase (i, i) forms.

Codes for computing

In Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
the capital I is codepoint U+0049 and the lower case i is U+0069.

The ASCII

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange , is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words....
code for capital I is 73 and for lowercase i is 105; or in binary

Binary numeral system

The binary numeral system, or notation with a radix of 2. Owing to its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry using logic gates, the binary system is used internally by all modern computers....
01001001 and 01101001, respectively.

The EBCDIC

EBCDIC

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used on IBM mainframe operating systems such as z/OS, OS/390, VM and VSE , as well as IBM midrange computer operating systems such as OS/400 and i5/OS ....
code for capital I is 201 and for lowercase i is 137.

The numeric character reference

Numeric character reference

A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-based markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of character s that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode....
s in HTML

HTML

HTML, an Acronym and initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for Web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document?by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on?and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded '...
and XML are "I" and "i" for upper and lower case, respectively.

I

History

Codes for computing

See also