03-04-2012, 07:35 AM
I think there is a potential explanation for this. It may be that, as 'ic' faded, a little dot was placed on top, to indicate that a letter had been dropped. Legal copyists until this century did this kind of thing, using something like a Spanish tilde, and in French, where there is a circumflex (^) it almost always represents an 's' which has been dropped. In English, it would make entire sense to join the small i with its dot, for convenience, in cases where it occurs frequently, ie, in capitals, or when representing the first pers. sing. Would we all not do that, if copying were our daily task? One also sees similar abbreviations in churches, and other places with some sort of memorial, where the Latin has been hacked to pieces, but with a few 'diacritics' added -- for those of us with little Latin, and less Greek, it is a pain to make our task of making some use of what knowledge we picked up, harder than it need be. 