Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

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

From:J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...>
Date:Saturday, January 22, 2005, 11:17
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

Replies

Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>