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

From:Danny Wier <dawiertx@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 26, 2004, 17:12
From: David Peterson

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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.

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Reminds me so much of fontfaces I used to see a lot in the 1970s, which
mixed capital and small letters and made them all the same height. I'm
trying to think of an example; the only one I can remember is the old logo
of the MasterCard credit card, which was then called MasterCharge. In fact,
it may have been a sans-serif verson of Alphabet 26 (without the larger
'capitals'). Must've been the fad of that day.

I made a mistake in my original post on this topic, by the way - Georgian in
_mxedruli_ script does have capitals, called _mtavruli_; those are only used
in headlines and emphasized text and the letters are all capital-size, with
no descenders. They remind me of those old A26-inspired fonts.

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