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

On 22 Jan 2005, at 10.17 pm, J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:

> 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.
I think the point there was that it's being written in the Roman
alphabet, and most transliterations use English-style capitalisation, I
think (at least when transliterated by English users).

> 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)
Georgian, I think, does. Or maybe it's only did?

>  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),
As I understand it modern Greek hardly even uses the capital letters!

>  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).
Well, apparently there was a Dutch Study sometime in the twentieth
Century that found reading(?) was significantly better with capitalised
Nouns, which led Britons to try to get Everyone to capitalise their
Nouns. Guess how well it succeeded ;)

Having tried it, I don't actually think much of English with
capitalised Nouns, we have a Habit of writing things that feel like a
single compound Noun (to me) as an Adjective and a Noun, separated by
Whitespace... 'Twentieth Century' or 'compound Noun' for instance.
(Astute Readers have probably noticed my inability to work out when to
put a Space or Hyphen in or join two Words...)

--
Tristan.

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