uppercase/lowercase (was: Of Haa/hhet & other matters)

On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 07:26:08 +0000, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

>But why do we need both upper and lower case forms? Mainly just
>Greek-derived alphabets that seem to feel the need. Arabic, Hebrew, the
>many Indian scripts, Burmese, Thai and others seem to get along happily
>without separate upper & lower case.
The scripts that have uppercase and lowercase (as far as I know it's only
the Roman alphabet, the Greek alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet) derive
from the Greek alphabet, but it's not because of this derivation that they
distinguish uppercase and lowercase (compare other Greek-derived alphabets
such as the Coptic or the Gothic), but rather because of the influence of
modern typography.

To me, it seems strange that we use two alphabets at the same time
(uppercase and lowercase). In English and French, at least, the Grammarians
forbade the habit of capitalizing more and more words, whereas they backed
it up in German and Danish (though the Danes luckily abandoned it after WW2).

kry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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