Why does English alphabets have both capital and small letters?
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The characters that became our modern “upper-case” letters are the older set. Most of them hail at least as far back as ancient Greece, possibly even farther in more unrecognizable form. They’re great great great great grandchildren of when letters used to be simplified pictureforms of objects or concepts. Back in those days, writing was done by carving stone or pressing into soft clay, which favored characters with straight lines and harsh angles.
As smooth, bindable paper became common, and literacy rose through the common masses driving demand for literature, there was a lot of bookwriting going on. The concept of “printing” wasn’t yet a thing, so if you wanted a copy of a book, you either had to write the entire book again by hand, or have someone else do it for you. Writing all these harsh-angled characters took extra strokes and forced you to remove your writing implement from the page, wasting time and increasing the chance of inking mistakes, so many of them mutated into forms more suitable for handwriting. This generally meant more curves, fewer strokes. The old style of letters were kept around mostly to denote Things of Importance such as Names of People, Places, the beginnings of Sentences, and, well… God, naturally, as it was primarily Christian monks doing a lot of the writing with this alphabet at this time.
One of the more fun facts is how “upper case” and “lower case” got their names. Those come from the era of the printing press, where letters could be arranged on a pressing plate to mass-produce print media. Each letter was its own little metal plate, and when not in use they’d be stored on shelves in little cases. The smaller letters, used far more abundantly and thus would benefit from being easy to grab, were literally stored on the lower shelf, the “lower case”, while the capital letters were stored on the higher shelves, the “upper case”.
Capital letters denote the start of a sentence, name, title or place.
So for example:
Hello, my name is Colvack.
Start of the sentence begins with H, however if I said ‘Good evening’, it would begin with G, as it’s the start of a sentence. The next capital letter can be seen in my name, as in ‘Colvack’. So if your name was ‘Abdullah’, you’d say:
‘Hello, my name is Abdullah’
(Going off your username, apologies if that’s not your name!)
Lower case letters typically denote everything else. It’s the same alphabet as each lower-case is equal to its upper case.
Hope this helps!
They’re not “English” alphabets but rather modern adaptations of the Latin alphabet that many Western languages use.
It helps with reading – you can easily see where a new sentence begins and you can spot proper nouns/names quicker.
If you really into knowing the history of English, I highly recommend The History of the English Podcast ([https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/](https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/)).
It covers all kinds of questions like this. Where does English come from? Why is there so much French/German in it? Why do we use the Alphabet? Where does it come from?
Capital and lower-case letters add additional information that makes things clearer for the reader when they might otherwise be ambiguous.
This is why we have punctuation, for example. Periods, commas, parentheses, apostrophes, and quotation marks all make sentences more readable, they reduce ambiguity. In the same way, making some letters capital and some letters lower-case also makes sentences more readable.
We all know the funny example:
>Let’s eat grandma
>Let’s eat, grandma
Punctuation makes these two sentences totally different. In the same way, capitalization can make sentences different.
>the major corporation reading incorporated filed a lawsuit against the ftc and secretary welds
>The major corporation Reading Incorporated filed a lawsuit against the FTC and Secretary Welds
Capitalization here makes the sentence much clearer and easier to read. You now immediately understand that “Reading” and “Incorporated” are part of a proper name, they’re not verbs here, same with “Welds”. The acronym FTC is also more obviously an acronym.
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