Letter Case - History

History

Originally alphabets were written entirely in capital letters, spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds. When written quickly with a pen, these tended to turn into rounder and much simpler forms, like uncials. It is from these that the first minuscule hands developed, the half-uncials and cursive minuscule, which no longer stay bound between a pair of lines. These in turn formed the foundations for the Carolingian minuscule script, developed by Alcuin for use in the court of Charlemagne, which quickly spread across Europe.

European languages, except for Ancient Greek and Latin, did not make the case distinction before about 1300. In Latin, papyri from Herculaneum dating before 79 have been found which include lower-case letters a, b, d, h, p, and r. According to papyrologist Knut Kleve, "The theory, then, that the lower-case letters have been developed from the fifth century uncials and the ninth century Carolingian miniscules seems to be wrong."

Both "majuscule" ( /məˈdʒʌskjuːlz/ or /ˈmædʒəskjuːlz/) and "minuscule" letters existed, but the printing press had not yet been invented, and a given handwritten document could use either one size/style or the other. However, before about 1700 literacy was comparatively low in Europe and the Americas. Therefore, there was not any motivation to use both upper case and lower case letters in the same document as all documents were used by only a small number of scholars.

The timeline of writing in Western Europe can be divided into four eras:

• Greek majuscule (9th–3rd century B.C.) in contrast to the Greek uncial script (3rd century BC – 12 century AD) and the later Greek minuscule
• Roman majuscule (7th century BC – 4th century AD) in contrast to the Roman uncial (4th–8th century BC), Roman Half Uncial, and minuscule
• Carolingian majuscule (4th–8th century AD) in contrast to the Carolingian minuscule (around 780 – 12th century)
• Gothic majuscule (13th and 14th century), in contrast to the early Gothic (end of 11th to 13th century), Gothic (14th century), and late Gothic (16th century) minuscules.

Traditionally, certain letters were rendered differently according to a set of rules. In particular, those letters that began sentences or nouns were made larger and often written in a distinct script. There was no fixed capitalization system until the early 18th century. The English language eventually dropped the rule for nouns, while the German language kept it.

Similar developments have taken place in other alphabets. The lower-case script for the Greek alphabet has its origins in the 7th century and acquired its quadrilinear form in the 8th century. Over time, uncial letter forms were increasingly mixed into the script. The earliest dated Greek lower-case text is the Uspenski Gospels (MS 461) in the year 835. The modern practice of capitalizing the first letter of every sentence seems to be imported (and is rarely used when printing Ancient Greek materials even today).