Why does English alphabets have both capital and small letters?
In: Other
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”.
Latest Answers