Why upper and lower case letters?

Factual Questions
1

Where did the idea of upper and lower case letters come from?
I know of Greek having two cases, did they get used in a similar fashion to modern English (At the start of propper nowns). Do any languages have more than two cases? Are there phonetic languages with only one case?

2

I don’t know why European alphabets wound up with cases, but I know from a friend who’s a native of Burma that Burmese is a phonetic language that lacks case. Given that Burmese is originally derived from Sanskrit, I’d hazard a guess that other written languages in that family are also caseless. I’m also reasonably sure that Japanese kanji (is that the phonetic one?) also has no case.

But the only one I know about for sure is Burmese.

3

“Kanji” is the Japanese iteration of the Chinese Han characters. They are not phonetic. The Japanese phonetic system (which is actually descended from Sanskrit) does not have cases, per se, but there are two separate orthographic systems for writing it, called Katakana and Hiragana.

This page has a longer comparison of the above.

4

The lower-case forms developed from the Carolingian, Uncial, and Half-Uncial scripts (see here). How they were then recombined with capital letters to create the system we use today I’m not sure.

5

Wikipedia

(This B.B.C. article repeats misinformation about the capitalization of E. E. Cummings’s name.)

6

Thanks for the Wikepedia link. I had no idea that the cases were so recent (700 AD ish) So all those lower case Greek symbols I learnt in maths would have had no meaning to Pythagarus et al.

7

As for languages with more than two cases, Arabic has four ways of writing a letter: initial (beginning of word), medial (middle), final (end of word), and then another form for when a letter is written alone. I think Hebrew is similar too, but don’t remember exactly.

8

Thanks, I tend to get them mixed up, since I know squat about Japanese. Now, I’ve heard katakana used before, but never hiragana. Is katakana used more frequently?

9

Katakana is used for foreign words - like conpyuutaa (computer) and pan (means bread I think the orginal word was Portugeuse). Hiraga is used for native Japanese words. You also see katakana used for emphasis (like italics) and for sound effects in manga.