From Old English 'ic', from PIE *éǵh₂ — cognate with Latin 'ego', Greek 'egṓ', Sanskrit 'aham'. The only pronoun capitalized in English, a scribal habit from the 1300s when a lone lowercase 'i' was too easy to lose in handwriting.
The first-person singular nominative pronoun, used by a speaker to refer to themselves.
From Old English 'ic' (pronounced /itʃ/), from Proto-Germanic *ek/*ik, from Proto-Indo-European *éǵh₂ (I, ego). The modern single-letter form 'I' is the result of over a thousand years of phonetic erosion: Old English 'ic' lost its final consonant in unstressed positions during Middle English, leaving just the vowel. The convention of capitalizing 'I' emerged in the 13th–14th century, likely for legibility — a lone lowercase 'i' was easily lost in handwritten manuscripts. Key roots: *éǵh₂ (Proto-Indo-European: "I (first
English is the only major language that capitalizes its first-person pronoun. German capitalizes 'Sie' (formal you), but not 'ich' (I). The capitalization of 'I' was not a grammatical rule but a scribal convenience — a single lowercase letter was too easy to overlook in medieval handwriting, so scribes made it tall. The habit stuck.