From “i” to “I”: The Subtle Power of English Language Individualism
Note from Barrett: September has been a surprisingly hectic month with the start of classes at GW, family visiting, and my son’s first birthday; and this is why I have been less consistent with the newsletter of late. I appreciate your patience and understanding, and the next newsletter will arrive on Sunday at 11am EST as usual.
Sometimes the influence of language can be so subtle and pervasive that we overlook how a simple feature of a language can reshape how we understand ourselves and the world around us. So today, I will talk about arguably the most subtle and influential trait of the English language: the word “I”.
English is the only language that capitalizes the singular personal pronoun, and this linguistic anomaly may contribute to the embrace of an unsustainable, destructive individualism within much of the English-speaking world.
The United States celebrates “American individualism” and believes that our commitment to individualism contributes to our alleged exceptionalism. America’s embrace of individualism is so profound that successful Americans are encouraged to perceive and describe themselves as being “self-made”. A “self-made” person has individually risen to the top without the help of anyone, including their parents, who literally made them and brought them into existence.
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Obviously, it is impossible to confirm that the capitalization of “I” has directly resulted in a culture of individualism, but likewise, it would also be absurd to assume that centuries of capitalizing oneself and lowercasing everyone else has not had an impact on how we perceive the world and ourselves. Additionally, the capitalization of “I” while lowercasing “we” signifies that one becomes less significant once they become part of a group. Moving from “I” to “we” appears to be a demotion according to written English.
So why did this bizarre linguistic quirk happen in English and what can we do next?
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The Spoken Word, Typography and Aesthetics
Apparently, the creation of “I” happened very organically during the Middle Ages in Europe.
In Old and Middle English, which were spoken from the 5th to 15th centuries (Old English from the 5th to 11th, and Middle from the 11th to 15th), the singular personal pronoun in English was ic. This word was a cousin to the German ich, but over the thousand years of the Middle Ages the English pronunciation began to change and the c sound became less prominent.
The erasure of the c in ic happened organically, and the normalized illiteracy of Europe during the Dark Ages and the absence of standardized written English seems to have made this regressive trajectory almost inevitable.
Even today, we all speak some form of slang that does not align with our written language. For example, I am from the South and when I bump into another Southerner it is normal for me to subconsciously drop “ing” from many words and replace it with “in’”. I no longer say “fixing”, “doing”, or “teaching”, and instead say “fixin’”, “doin’”, and “teachin’”. Similar adjustments exist within spoken languages, but we know to not write any of these words because we have a formalized language.
Without a formalized written language, replacing “ing” with “in’” when we speak would become the new universal standard, and once we decided to formalize the language, “ing” would have become a relic of the old language while “in’” would become the new standard. This is what gradually happened to ic over the course of a thousand years.
In the 15th century Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionized Europe, enabling Europeans to imprint these spoken languages on paper and the printed word spread across the continent. The English accent had changed the sound of the singular personal pronoun, and now the English started printing the lowercase “i” but many scholars found this letter to be aesthetically unappealing.
The desire to create a more appealing letter resulted in typographers elongating “i”. Additionally, it should be noted that since English does not use accents, there were few options for making the letter more aesthetically pleasing. Despite English being heavily influenced by French and German, the language has never incorporated accents, so none of these accented iterations of “i” were viable options: ì, í, î, ĩ, ī, ĭ, ï, ǐ.
Due to this bizarre convergence of factors the German word ich morphed into the English word ic that would eventually become i and rather quickly became I once the English learned how to read and print.
Once the English could read their native language, they learned to think of themselves (or an individualistic “I” that lived in all English-speaking people) as something that was greater than “you,” “he,” “she,” “we,” “they,” and “it” and on par with proper nouns such as nations, cultures, and religions.
Unsurprisingly, an embrace of René Descartes’ philosophy of “I think, therefore I am” has been embraced by much of the English-speaking world, and a culture of individualism was birthed from European Enlightenment.
Individualism, Philosophy, Property, and Freedom
The United States embraces an individualistic interpretation of freedom, and many people believe that freedom equates to being “free” to do whatever you want, no matter how irresponsible your actions may be. Libertarians and Republicans even champion the necessity of reducing the size of the government because taxes and laws are apparently restrictions to “freedom.”
These ideas are absurd, and it is clear how the individualistic interpretation of freedom feels threatened by a collective application of freedom. These Americans do not want their capitalized “I” to become “reduced” to a lowercase “we.” These ideas are incredibly dangerous because they are so pernicious, and it is important to examine the frameworks of these troubling ideas so that we can adequately deconstruct them.
The United States’ interpretation of freedom derives mostly from the English, and we cannot underestimate how the subtleties of this language have influenced our thoughts and philosophies for hundreds of years.
During the Middle Ages, it was common for English peasants to collectively work a plot of land known as the “commons”. The workers of the land did not own the land. The property was collectively managed by the community without ownership, yet everyone worked together to sustain the land. The commons is not too dissimilar from how Indigenous people in the Americas managed their land without a belief in property.
However, as systems of feudalism began collapsing around the end of the Middle Ages, new ideas of property and ownership spread throughout England, and affluent people in England began buying up and destroying the commons. The wealth of one “I” destroyed the livelihood of a “we,” and the philosophy used to support the destruction of the commons proclaimed that collective land used to sustain the people lacked value because the crops were not generating a profit or capital.
Once the “I” became capitalized, the English developed economic policies that destroyed the collective, and the money they obtained from this destruction was called “capital” to denote its importance. Over the course of hundreds of years, capitalism became the name of the economic system to describe the movement of capital that was often produced from the privatization of land and the commodification of land and people.
In this individualistic environment that destroys the collective, freedom cannot be obtained without property or ownership because they are supposed to protect an individual from being purchased, oppressed, and commodified by a powerful “I” that aspires to buy up the world with their capital, so that they can generate more capital. Property and ownership in this world prevents people from being bought, yet in order to not be bought, you must buy or own enough to prevent yourself from being bought. This obviously creates a vicious cycle of consumption devoid of freedom, yet the United States still subscribes to this understanding of “freedom.”
Thomas Jefferson’s famous line, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” derives from English philosopher John Locke’s phrase “life, liberty and property.” For obvious reasons, Jefferson’s and the United States’ embrace of chattel slavery made the mention of “property” a controversial topic, so Jefferson replaced it with “the pursuit of happiness.” The meaning remains but the phrase sounds better, and now Americans were encouraged to pursue happiness by acquiring property, which included both land and people.
Today, American laws still allow people to use lethal force to defend their property, and we view home ownership as an indicator of the general health of the American economy. Owning property equates to happiness, and on our land we are supposed to be free to do whatever irresponsible things we want.
This is a freedom that relegates the “we” to an afterthought, and embraces the individualistic, capitalized “I” of the self-made billionaire, real estate mogul, or businessman who has a seemingly infinite amount of capital.
Theoretically, the entire world could be a vastly different place if i remained ic or acquired an accent, and never became I. One capitalized letter may have rewritten the world.
My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released on October 12, 2021 and NPR has picked it as one of the top books of the year!
You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com
Fascinating analysis of language and its affect on culture.