Wednesday, April 15, 2009

it & I

In English, we capitalize pronouns when they refer to divinity. We call Jesus & th Buddha He & Him, & when they speak, they say Me & My. We don't capitalize pronouns otherwise, except for when they appear at th beginning of a sentence, & whenever we write th tiny word I. Does this mean that we recognize ourselves as divine, but no other beings, not th its, th yous, th shes in our lives? We don't even capitalize 'me', implying, perhaps, that we recognize our own divinity only when we speak of ourselves as agents of a sentence, & not when we objectify ourselves. What a special word, this I.

So what happens if I write about It & Her, You, We & Us?

Interestingly, we have just started in recent years to call ourselves lowercase 'i'. What does this say about how we feel about ourselves & our relationship to th divine?

^ Bad linguistics, I know, but maybe a worthwhile writing experiment....

2 comments:

Rebelfish said...

Interestingly, the first person is not capitalized in Spanish (yo). Then again, neither or other words we do, like months or days of the week.

Kyle said...

Cultural shifts are made up of individual changes... personally, I have different capitalization principles for different media. For instant messages, I ignore the shift key unless necessary (e.g.: to refer to an acronym that is otherwise ambiguous). For text messages on phones, it automatically capitalizes the first word in each sentence and "I", so I leave it like that. For everything else, I try to maintain "cultural continuity" (capitalize what is "proper").

I don't know if I really like this media-dependent scheme though. It seems like it would be more elegant if we dropped capitals all together in all media. Most writing systems don't have capitals, only a few major systems like the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic alphabet are exceptions...