This pattern arose for basically the same reason that lowercase ⟨i⟩ acquired a dot: so it wouldn't get lost in manuscripts before the age of printing: The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is 'I', pronounced / aɪ/ and always written with a capital letter. The letter ⟨i⟩ is the fifth most common letter in the English language. Because the diphthong /aɪ/ developed from a Middle English long vowel, it is called 'long' ⟨i⟩ in traditional English grammar. In the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English /iː/ changed to Early Modern English /ei/, which later changed to /əi/ and finally to the Modern English diphthong /aɪ/ in General American and Received Pronunciation. The diphthong /aɪ/ developed from Middle English /iː/ through a series of vowel shifts. In Modern English spelling, ⟨i⟩ represents several different sounds, either the diphthong / aɪ/ ('long' ⟨i⟩) as in kite, the short / ɪ/ as in bill, or the ⟨ee⟩ sound / iː/ in the last syllable of machine. In the Turkish alphabet, dotted and dotless I are considered separate letters, representing a front and back vowel, respectively, and both have uppercase ('I', ' İ') and lowercase (' ı', 'i') forms. The dot over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a tittle. The modern letter ' j' originated as a variation of 'i', and both were used interchangeably for both the vowel and the consonant, coming to be differentiated only in the 16th century. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used to represent /j/ and this use persists in the languages that descended from Latin. The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota ( ⟨Ι, ι⟩) to represent /i/, the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. This letter could also be used to represent /i/, the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words. In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative ( /ʕ/) in Egyptian, but was reassigned to /j/ (as in English ' yes') by Semites, because their word for 'arm' began with that sound. Its name in English is i (pronounced / ˈ aɪ/), plural ies. I, or i, is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide.

I''s, #30 by Masakazu Katsura