In trying to teach my 2 1/2 year old daughter to identify different letters, I’ve found it annoying that there isn’t just one version of each letter. And in some cases, the uppercase and lowercase letters look very different. As a result my daughter can readily recognize an uppercase letter A–“Up, down, across!” But, identifying the lowercase ‘a’ has been a toughie, that my wife and I have decided to shelve until later.
So the questions are:
Why do we even have upper and lowercase letters?
1a. What linguistic phenomenon necessitated the need for both?
1b. Why do the uppercases, on occasion, look so different from the lowercases?
Do all written alphabets have both uppercase and lowercase letters?
Capitals came from the forms of the letters used in inscriptions. Lower-case letters came from written forms. Originally they began as similar and diverged as scribes came up with different ways of writing in order to serve different purposes (speed, space, aesthetics, etc.)
1a. Originally, the lower-case letters evolved from the Carolingian minuscules, which developed from the necessity for writing quickly. I don’t know how they were recombined with capitals to create our current system.
1b. The lower-case letters took their shape from script as opposed to carvings. If you look carefully, you can see how both forms of the lower-case a (one-storey and two-storey) evolved from the upper-case A. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to illustrate it in ASCII. Just imagine writing “A” quickly over and over again. In one sequence, combine the left-hand diagonal with the cross-bar in one stroke and lengthen and curve the right-hand diagonal. In the other sequence, keep shortening the right-hand diagonal.
No. Indian alphabets, for example (Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, etc.), do not distinguish between majuscule and minuscule. Same with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other East and Southeast Asian writing systems.
jharding… Didn’t you learn to write using both lower and upper case letters? That is what we all use and have used for many years now. Why should we change?
I don’t completly agree on this point, since there is a lot of similarity between lower and upper case letters in the Greek alphabet (or is it greek… ) and the Roman alphabet we use nowadays so I think the origin of the form of the letters might derive from there, rather than a simplification for writing purposes you describe.
How do you think the lower-case forms in the Greek alphabet developed? I think they developed in the same way and probably in parallel with rather than prior to the development of lower-case forms in the Roman alphabet. Remember, the Greek alphabet started with capitals only as well. Note in several cases how the lower-case Greek forms are quite different from Roman forms. Perhaps some of the lower-case Greek forms either developed along the same route or Greek and Roman writing development influenced each other, but that does not contradict anything I said before.
) and the Roman alphabet we use nowadays so I think the origin of the form of the letters might derive from there, rather than a simplification for writing purposes you describe.