| 词源 |
I. The letter I comes from the stylized drawing of the Phoeni- cian alphabet and is thought to have been based on a picture of the human finger. People at first did not have to remember to dot their i’s. The dot on the i wasn’t added to the letter until the 11th century, when scribes introduced it to distinguish two i’s coming together (as in filii) from the letter u. Up until the 19th century the written and printed i and j were interchangeable and dictionaries didn’t treat them as separate letters. Our word I is a shortening of the much older ik. The vowel in this word was originally pronounced like the i in his. See iota; tittle. |