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

Dan wrote:

<<1) If your conlangs are written in two-case alphabets/abjads/syllabries,
what are the rules?>>

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, but I still liked
the ideas of capitals for the
alphabet I was using, so I put them at the end.   Works quite nicely.
Here's the site:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/zhyler/orthography.html

On the other hand, I used capitals in Sathir to denote geminates.   All
geminates degeminated in the
history of the language, but not after singleton stops voiced
intervocalically.   So now uppercase stops
in the middle of a word indicate voiceless stops, and lowercase indicate
voiced stops.   Additionally,
though, there used to be a distinction between words beginning with geminates
and words beginning
with singletons.   When that distinction was lost, there were some words that
begin with capitals, and
some that didn't, so I imagined that it would get reanalyzed such that all
stops word-initially would be
capitalized, and that's the way it is.   You can see an example of a sentence
here:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/sathir/main.html

<<2) Sometime in the more-or-less distant future, could European languages
(or
'LGCA' languages I call them, analogous to the term 'CJK' used by Unicoders)
adopt single-case alphabets, and if so, would it be a 'third case' like
_mxedruli_ in Georgian, simplified in form?>>

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.   The reason
for the creation of the
alphabet, apparently, was that it's hard to connect a lower and upper case
letter to the same sound,
and that this prevents children from being able to learn to read right away.
 The example that I saw
sited was "r" and "R".   Allegedly (and I'm relating from memory, so I may be
getting the facts wrong)
Thompson saw his child struggling to comprehend how "r" and "R" could both
represent /r\/, and
that was his impetus for creating the alphabet.

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.

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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