In the middle of sentence, which one do we have to use, I or i?
"You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!" (King Lear, 2.4.291-305)
or
"You heavens, give me that patience, patience i need!" (King Lear, 2.4.291-305)
Can you explain the correct usage with reasons?
The personal pronoun 'I' is always written with a capital letter in standard English. That's just the convention. Lower-case 'i' is very common in texts, informal emails and chatrooms, but is still considered incorrect elsewhere.
It turns out that this unusual convention was a bit of an accident. In Old and Middle English, the word for “I” was closer to its German cousin, “ich,” and it was often spelled “ic.” At this point, the word was not capitalized. However, the pronunciation changed over time and so did the spelling, losing the consonant c.
At first, the new word, i, was left lowercase. However, it began to grow taller than other words. It grew for a silly reason: a single letter looks bad. Look at it: i. How sad. By the time Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late 1300s, I, the personal pronoun, was slightly taller than its lowercase equivalent. From that point on, it was typically capitalized.
The only other accepted single-letter word in English, a, is a larger presence on the page. Its appearance isn’t as offensive as the thin i.
Today, though, some of us are regressing. In e-mails and instant message conversations, capitalization conventions are backsliding.
