Daily Meh is an edited stream of consciousness, by Simen.

Why do we capitalize the word “I”?

“Graphically, single letters are a problem,” says Charles Bigelow, a type historian and a designer of the Lucida and Wingdings font families. “They look like they broke off from a word or got lost or had some other accident.” When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Bigelow explains, “one little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.”

Ok, so now we’ve got that sorted, can someone explain to me why the hell the Germans insist on capitalizing nouns, but not — excepting “Sie” — pronouns? (Via Kottke.)

Update: looking a little closer into it, this is what the alt.usage.english faq, quoting The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, says:

Modern and Middle English I developed from earlier i in the stressed position. I came to be written with a capital letter thereby making it a distinct word and avoiding misreading handwritten manuscripts. In the northern and midland dialects of England the capitalized form I appeared about 1250. In the south of England, where Old English ic early shifted in pronunciation to ich (by palatalization), the form I did not become established until the 1700’s (although it appears sporadically before that time).