Re: Latin mxedruli, or do we really need capital and small letters?

[Danny Wier]

> > 1) If your conlangs are written in two-case
> > alphabets/abjads/syllabries, what are the rules?
It just occurred to me: Could a case be made for a higher-
than-two-case system, say, a three-case system with uppercase,
lowercase and 'middlecase'?  Come to think of it, in a way
that's what we actually have already... counting small caps!
Any idea for a four-case system?


[David Peterson]

>Zhyler has a backwards system: Punctuation comes first; capitalization
last.
> The reason?   Basically,
>capitalization is just a nicety to let your reading eyes know where a new
>sentence starts.   Punctuation,
>on the other hand, is *very* important.   Consider reading aloud (happens
all
>the time in school).   Say
>you're reading a play, and you have the following line:
>
>Character A: You went to the store?!
>
>This is supposed to be read with a "surprised" intonation (what this
>intonation is will vary person-to-
>person, dialect-to-dialect, context-to-context), but if you're reading
aloud,
>you start from the beginning,
>and if you can't predict it, or don't read ahead, you just might start
>reading this with a declarative into-
>nation, and hence, get it wrong, and may try to "fix" the intonation at
the
>end, which always sounds
>funny.   For that reason, I moved punctuation to the front,
And for that reason we use the starting interrogative (¿)
and exclamative (¡) points in Spanish, ;-). Should tell
those people who say these characteristic graphemes of
our orthography are 'useless' and should thus be abandoned
because, they say, questions and exclamations are already
marked by the ending points 'like in all other languages'...

OTOH, is your system of punctuation marks more complete/accurate
than that of Roman script, which hardly differentiates between
several semantically relevant intonations?

Has anybody invented additional punctuation marks for the
Roman script - say, like that (not very successful) symbol
that fuses "?" and "!"?


>Let me point you to Alphabet 26 developed in 1950 by Bradbury Thompson.
>Langmaker.com has a
>page on it here:
>
>http://www.langmaker.com/db/alp_alphabet26.htm
>
>It's basically the Roman alphabet crammed into a single case.
[...]
>Oh, you know what?   I just looked at this, and apparently Alphabet 26
still
>has upper and lower case
>letters: They just look the same.   Oh well.   It's close.
The bad thing is that he inadequately chose the letter forms
without ascenders/descenders. Cyrillic is less easily readable
than Roman precisely because it features less ascenders/descenders.

Cheers,
Javier

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