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

From: "Philippe Caquant" <herodote92@...>

> I believe Arabic has 4 forms for some letters: word
> initial, inside of the word, end of the word, and
> isolated letter.
Arabic has four forms for most letters, though in almost all cases they
could really be described as having two forms with or without connection to
a following letter; /h/ and the feminine suffix still have four forms in
this interpretation. And of course several letters do not connect to
following letters, therefore have only two (or one) form. These obviously
aren't 'cases', used the same way as Latin uses capitals or small letters --
one can't write a medial letter where an initial or final letter should be,
for example.

Another script with multiple forms for different letters: Devanagari. Vowels
without consonants are written differently than vowels with consonants (they
simply become additive strokes), and consonants conjoined to following
consonants often change form or at least become attached to the following
consonant in some way, at least in traditional Sanskrit writing. Tamil
writes vowels differently depending on whether they're alone or following a
consonant, but consonants before consonants are simply marked with a dot
above, the _virama_. Again, not the same thing as case as we know it; these
are better regarded as an alphasyllabric feature in both cases, and in the
case of Devanagari consonant clusters, ligatures.

> In Greek, you have two forms for minuscule beta
> (beginning or inside of the word), and two for
> minuscule sigma (inside or end of the word); plus the
> capital forms.
Hebrew also has distinct final forms for /k/~/x/, /m/, /n/, /p/~/f/ and
/ts/. But if I'm not mistaken, the non-final form of /p/ can be used
word-finally in foreign words ending in /p/, since most everyday text does
not include _dagesh_ or vowel points. (Steg and the other Dan would know for
sure.)

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