Why english language has Capital Letters and lower case...but both meaning same.. (H vs h)...

[dasari4kntr]

why there is two cases..for same.....phonetics..

is any other language has this....?

 

got this doubt...while reading/listening to below book.. (still reading…)…

this book is going in humor direction...but i want to know what is the real cause of these two cases...

 

[dasari4kntr]

https://archive.org/details/vishnusharmaengl026111mbp/page/n1/mode/2up

[Truth_Holds]

Good post

Ee site lo comments choodu.. baavunnayi

https://painintheenglish.com/case/4334?sort=PostComments.score&direction=desc

 

[dasari4kntr]

10 minutes ago, Truth_Holds said:

Good post

Ee site lo comments choodu.. baavunnayi

https://painintheenglish.com/case/4334?sort=PostComments.score&direction=desc

 

Excellent..thanks bro…will check it out now..

[dasari4kntr]

17 minutes ago, Truth_Holds said:

Good post

Ee site lo comments choodu.. baavunnayi

https://painintheenglish.com/case/4334?sort=PostComments.score&direction=desc

 

Nice explanation…

Now capitals are maintained only for legibility …

 

————————————————

The question is interesting, but I would reverse it: Why does English have lower-case letters? Most of the letters used in English derive from the Roman alphabet, which was entirely upper case. (The terms upper case and lower case derive from movable-type printing, and refer to the physical location of the racks—cases—where each set of type was located.) Lower-case letters derive from script, and predate printing. 

According to Wikipedia: "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 unicals. It is from these that the first minuscule hands developed, the half-unicals and cursive minuscule, which no longer stay bound between a pair of lines."

The key script was Carolingian miniscule, which was "developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the small literate class from one region to another. It was used in Charlemagne's empire between approximately 800 and 1200," again according to Wikipedia. 

The convention of capitalizing the first word in a sentence appears to have been part of Carolingian miniscule from the start. I don't know when the practice of capitalizing certain words—nouns, mainly—developed, but it used to be much wider in scope. Writers as recent as Jonathan Swift commonly capitalized all nouns; the same is true of the American Declaration of Independence. I suspect that the purpose was improved legibility, particularly in hand-written documents. English has largely abandoned capitalized nouns, with specific exceptions, such as names. German, on the other hand, still capitalizes all nouns.

The reason English continues to retain capital letters is primarily legibility. Words written in lower-case letters, with their varied sizes and shapes, are indeed easier to read than words written in all-caps. But capital letters add a layer of information to the writing, signifying sentence starts, names, titles, and proper nouns. The current trend away from capitalization is driven largely by email and particularly by texting. In the latter, shifting between cases is cumbersome; in the former it is simply laziness. If you find it cumbersome to capitalize, be glad you're not writing German.

[dasari4kntr]

When it comes to letters, case refers to whether letters are written in larger uppercase form, which is also often known as majuscule or capital letters, or smaller lowercase form, which is also known as miniscule or small letters. For example, the first three letters of the alphabet in uppercase form are A, B, and C. Those same three letters in lowercase form are a, b, and c.

Historians believe that majuscule or uppercase letters came first. The first alphabets were written entirely in large majuscule letters, evenly spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds.

Over time, however, it was only natural that smaller versions of each letter would develop. This probably happened as letters were written quickly. To save time and space, letters became smaller and more rounded as scribes hurried to finish their work.

These smaller versions of letters eventually evolved into an entire miniscule set of letters. Compared to majuscule versions, the minisculeversions offered improved and faster readability in addition to being easier and faster to write.

At first, scribes would only use majusculeor miniscule letters, but not a mixture of both. That changed over time, though. Although there were no official capitalization rules in the English language until the early 18^th century, scribes had traditionally written certain letters, such as nouns and the first letters of sentences, in a larger, distinct scriptfor hundreds of years.

Today, lowercase letters are used most frequently, with uppercase letters reserved for special purposes, such as capitalizing proper nouns or the first letter of a sentence. The terms “uppercase" and “lowercase" come from the way in which print shops were organized hundreds of years ago.