You can express everything you want with a single case of letters; who came up with lower and upper case and why?
No expert but surely it is like all punctuation - it makes it easier to read and extract meaning. In this case by - in English - marking the beginning of sentences and words that are proper nouns.
Should also have added that - I believe - capitals came first and lower case letters developed from them as being quicker and easier to write in about the 3rd century BC (for ancient Greek).
Yes, the caps came first. LATIN WAS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS. They are (supposedly) easy to carve in stone, but lacking ascenders and descenders, are wearying on the eye. RUSSIAN ONLY HAS CAPITALS, I THINK.
As to where we got lower cases letter, I know I knew that once, but I seem to have forgotten.
Capitals are the original form (so your question should be “How did lower case letters come to exist?”.) Lower case letters were devised by scribes at Charlemagne’s court, I believe because they could be written more quickly.
‘You can do it less elaborately than this’ isn’t really a consideration for much of what humans do - indeed taking what existed before and doing it more elaborately is quite normal - so in addition to lower case letters, we have calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts, typography…
For the same reason they developed spacing between words and various forms of punctuation, both of which came along much later.
in Russian the capitalisation is mostly by size alteration, e.g.
Йй
Цц
Нн
apart from some odd ones such as
А а
Neither Hebrew nor Arabic have capital letters.
Majuscules, as has been stated, are the original forms and are considered most suitable for carving in stone. Minuscule (lower case) letters developed from handwritten forms that eventually became the Carolingian minuscules. But up until this point, the minuscules were considered merely a variety of script. A scribe (or the scribe’s employer) chose a script to write whatever needed to be written.
The interesting question is really, who decided that majuscules and minuscules were two different things that could then be combined?
Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Burmese, Cambodian, Thai, Tibetan, Armenian, Ethiopian, and the Indian scripts also don’t differentiate between majuscules and minuscules.
And Russian cursive has some quite distinct letterforms between capitals and small letters.
IFYOUREADANCIENTROMANINSCRTIPTIONSTHEYALLLOOKLIKETHIS. We invented stuff to make stuff easier to read. You’d have thought they would bother to invent spaces between words, at least, though.
Yeah, but Arabic letters have different forms depending on where they are located in the word (first letter, middle, last). Sort of like cursive writing for the Roman alphabet, but a bit more complicated.
Hmm, you’re right - Hebrew also has a few letters with alternate forms, but only for the ends of words, never the beginning
Manuscripts after the Caroliginian Renaissance commonly had illuminated captial letters leading off sections, and important words were often written in a larger size or otherwise made distinctive in handwritten MSS. I think most writers ended up adapting these flourishes as a conventional capitalization rule in their own texts, a notion the printing press solidified. However, the variance of capitalization rules between languages–my understanding is the German, for example, capitalizes all nouns–makes me think capitalization was a relatively informal process well into the printed era: Every writer/publisher more or less followed their own standards which became somewhat formalized by the circle of native speakers they were writing for.
BTW Alcuin is usually credited with “inventing” the minuscules, but it was clearly a development of many scholars in or around the court of Charlemagne over a considerable period of time.
Hmm, I didn’t know that. I used to be able to read Hebrew, but it’s lost now. There isn’t a cursive form of Hebrew, is there? A few of the letters are just modified when written alone at the end of the word?
They did use spaces, little dots between words, or both :
http://www.davidthedesigner.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/08/22/trajan.png
Depends.
The Greeks didn’t use spaces or dots on inscriptions, although there looks to be something similar to a comma or semicolon I don’t recognize.
And neither Greek nor Latin manuscripts used spaces, although the Greek one seems to have periods.
With both Greek and Latin, we’re talking about a thousand years and almost as many regions, so general statements are usually wrong.
Both of you are right.
There is.