Why is the letter ‘I’ the easiest letter to write? One vertical stroke is all it takes. Compared to other words in the English language, which take many letters to denote their meaning, the letter ‘I’ communicates its meaning, the concept of the self, in the most simple way.
Does this convey a certain self-importance prevalent in our society? Do we who speak English really think that we are so important that talking about ourselves must be the easiest thing possible? I’m not so sure.
I took a look into the origins of this letter to learn more. The English pronoun I derives from Old English, and before that the Greek letter Iota. Iota originates from the Phoenician letter Yodh: Phoenician was used in Europe during the 1 st millennium BC and languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac are derived from it. The Phoenician Yodh comes from the Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘hand’ Unfortunately, this doesn’t exist on a modern-day keyboard, but I strongly encourage you to look it up: it really is a little tiny hand!
In my research, I couldn’t find out when these letters first took on the meaning of the first person pronoun. ‘I’ and ‘j’ were actually the same letter and used interchangeably in Old English until the 16th century. However, how I gained its semantic significance remains a mystery to me. What is revealed by the fact that this information is difficult to find? That the topic is under-researched? Or under-published? Whatever it may be, I think this case makes evident how important it is to stay curious about linguistic history.
Notably, in other languages, the concept of the self is not as linguistically simple to refer to. Some examples of I in other languages include Sanskrit’s अहम (aham), Swahili’s ‘mimi’ and Quecha’s ‘ñuqa’.
However, whilst one might jump to the conclusion that I is the easiest thing to write in English because of self-centredness or self-importance, I don’t think this is the case. To me it appears necessary to think of oneself first, because we can only think of the world in relation to ourselves.
