The parts of the human body also played an important part in giving form to the letters of the alphabet. The early peoples recognized the value of the hand and the head and these members gave rise to the letters I and K, and Q and R respectively. The hand in profile bent at the knuckles and wrist gives us the character “yod” (the hand) as used by the Phoenicians. The Greeks, who always liked to have their words end in vowels, added “a” and called it “Iota” (e-ota). When the Romans received it, it was simply a vertical stroke, I (ee) which represented the same long “e” sound as it did with the Greeks, but later they used it both as a consonant and vowel, differentiating the consonant by making the letter I longer, J; but they did not give a distinct letter form for the capital J until the sixteenth century.

The small j came into being nearly a century later. The dot over the i was first introduced in a thirteenth century manuscript.