Content deleted Content added
→note to Non-Native Speakers of English: Add the content I was forbidden to put on "another user's user page", obviously (upon reflection) bcz I was logged on as an ip user. Actually not at all a bizarre restriction. Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit |
→note to Non-Native Speakers of English: Remove accidental duplicate section Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit |
||
Line 56:
And thanks for being so neighborly as to gain whatever facility you have with this brash, typically American, and endlessly frustrating language.
----
Somewhere and -when since writing that, i stumbled across the orthodox (and IMO probably correct) explanation of the odd (and seemingly egotistical) casing: it apparently dates back to the age of [[manuscript]]s and [[scriptorium|scriptoria]]. When you're dealing with [[oak-gall]] ink and [[parchment]] from [[Pergamon]] (or with [[papyrus]]) (and [[pen]]s made by cutting off the tip of a goose [[flight feather|quill]] at a sharp angle, then cleverly [[nib (pen)|splitting the new tip]] to [[quill pen|make it feed]] the way a [[fountain pen]] does), you're going to have a fair number of stray marks -- particularly if it's not yet standard to [[tittle|"dot"]] the [[lowercase]] letters i and j (which i conjecture was another means of distinguishing them from strays). I presume that (except in the cases of royal personages) ''that'' need, institutionalized as orthography, was the source of the way i was ''taught'' to spell the nominative first singular pronoun. YMMV, an' dat's 'kay w/ Me!
----
| |||