Hythe, a parliamentary and municipal borough and market-town of Kent, 5 miles WSW. of Folkestone, 15 miles S. of Canterbury, and 67 SE. by E. of London by rail, is one of the Cinque Ports (q.v.), although in actual locality Lympne or Lymm (the ancient Portus Lemaniis of the Romans), now some three miles inland, was probably the original harbour. The town, which is pleasantly situated some distance from the sea, is built on the side of a hill, from the top of which an extensive view over the Romney marsh is obtained. Its church, a cruciform building of great beauty, in part Romanesque, has been restored since 1866, and contains in a crypt underneath the chancel an extraordinary collection of human skulls and bones—many of the skulls having deep cuts in them—the age and origin of which are altogether uncertain. Near to Hythe are the headquarters of the School of Musketry and Shorncliffe camp, both established in 1854; the picturesque ruins of Saltwood Castle, with memories of Becket; and the Royal Military Canal, 23 miles in length, constructed in 1805 for the conveyance of military stores to Rye, but never of much use, and now entirely superseded by the railway. In 1881 a sea-wall and parade, extending from Hythe to Sandgate (q.v.) and Folkestone (q.v.), was opened. These and some smaller places are included in the parliamentary borough of Hythe, which since 1832 has returned only one member. Pop. of that borough (1851) 13,164; (1891) 35,547, of whom 4347 were within the municipal limits, which include West Hythe.—In 1205 the French made a descent on Hythe, but were decisively repulsed, and later on, towards the end of the reign of Richard II., the town was visited with a threefold calamity, a fire having destroyed 200 houses, a pestilence carried off numerous inhabitants, and an unusually heavy storm caused a severe loss of men and slips. Several charters are preserved at Hythe, amongst them its earliest charter of incorporation granted in 1575. See Montagu Burrow's Cinque Ports (1888).

I

the ninth letter in the alphabets of western Europe, was called iota by the Greeks, from its Semitic name yod. Hence, owing to the character being the smallest in the Hebrew alphabet, we get the word jet, 'a tittle' (St Matt. v. 18), and jottings, or 'small notes.' The name yod meant a hand, the form of the character in the Egyptian Hieratic, from which the Phœnician alphabet was derived, bearing some resemblance to a hand, with the thumb held apart from the fingers (see ALPHABET). In early Greek inscriptions the form of the letter was angular, something like our Z; it then came to resemble S, and this, about the 7th century B.C., was straightened out into a vertical stroke. It has since varied less in form than any other letter. The dot in our minuscule i first came into use in the 11th century A.D. It was originally an accent, î, and was only employed to distinguish ii from u, or to mark the i in the combinations ui and iu. In the 12th century the accent began also to be used when i was in juxtaposition with m or n. It only became universal after the invention of printing, when it was found inconvenient to use two forms of type. In the 14th century a dot began to be substituted for the accent, the oldest MS. in which the dot is found dating from 1327. These distinctions may seem trivial, but are very useful in determining the dates of medieval MSS.

In Italian, and in most European languages, the sound of the letter is that of the Latin long i, the name-sound of our e, which we have in the English words machine and marine. The long i in Latin was always thus pronounced, and never like i in fine. The name-sound of our i, which is really a diphthong, is only heard in words where it is supported by a subscript e, as in bite, pipe, mine, or where it is followed by an old guttural, as in high, might, light. This became the name-sound because the pronoun I (A.S. ic, Ger. ich) was originally followed by a guttural which has now fallen out. The normal sound of i in English is that heard in bit, dip, sit, which is the short Latin i. This sound is represented by y in eymbal, by u in busy, by o in women, by ei in forfeit, by ie in sieve, by ui in guilt, by ee in breaches, and by ia in earriage. See J.