Why do we capitalize I and certain other nouns?

“Isn’t it a bit self-centred?”

Well, maybe that’s just it. It’s a pretty accurate reflection of our typical perspective.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=I

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03wwln-guestsafire-t.html

@SavoirFaire
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

That made me laugh.

Okay that make sense. But there’re also words with only one letter in other speeches. French for example. Or Spanish.

@fluthernutter me too lol

English capitalizes pretty much any noun that could be considered a name. They call them proper nouns. Country names, specific buildings, brands, that sort of thing. So if it refers to a class or type the noun isn’t captitalized, like skyscraper, oak tree or copier, but if it names a specific thing it is as with Sears Tower, Yggdrasil, Xerox machine.

The fact that we capitalize “I” always seemed like an anomaly to me. I suspect it’s a last hold over from the time when all nouns were capitalized.

English doesn’t capitalizes pretty much in contrast to german. Every noun and every proper noun is capitilized.
But “english” and “german” and so on isn’t a proper noun, so it isn’t capitilized. But however, thank you :)

In English, when “English” refers to the name of the language or the people of England it is considered a proper noun. Some of the time “English” acts as an adjective, but it stays captialized then too. Some of the adjectives derived from proper nouns stay captizalized. That’s less consistent though: Cartesian, nasty, Sisyphean, African, Kafkaesque, quixotic. But aside from the ones that come from place names those sort of words aren’t so widely used so I wouldn’t worry about them until you encounter them yourself.

I don’t know the real answer if there is one, but since English is Germanic, and according to jellies here German capitalizes a lot of nouns, I guess maybe we get it originally from German and then it changed and evolved to what is considered standard English today. I wonder with texting if I will finally be accepted as lower case? Or, every proper noun for that matter.

Each language seems to have it’s rules for capitalization, I don’t think one is better than the other. English capitalizes days of the week, Spanish doesn’t. Does it really matter? Not to me, but I care that I write it correctly.

Even in English it can be confusing when to capitalize. On my resume I wasn’t sure if I wanted to capitalize the words manager and buyer. I think it can go either way, maybe I am wrong.

I have a feeling I is some sort of anomaly also.

As @SavoirFaire said, “I” was capitalized simply for legibility. It has nothing to do with German. German does not capitalize the word for “I” (ich).

As for capitalizing names, in Old English names were not capitalized. In fact, in Old English there was no such thing as capital letters. So English capitalization is not a holdover from English’s Germanic heritage.

However, with the advent of the printing press, printing conventions in England followed conventions in the rest of Europe. So the fact that we used to capitalize nouns in the 17th century, and still capitalize names today, might have something to do with other European languages.

(C. M. Millward, A Biography of the English Language)

I am not sure, but what I think is:
The word “I” is a personal pronoun; it’s function is to take the place of the name of the person doing the writing. Thus, the capitalization. “You” is just “I“s shadow, so not much importance would be given to capitalization.
He, she and it are not capitalized (in the middle of a sentence)because those terms specifically do not refer to one person.