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Where do capital letters come from?
Are capital letters uppercase or lowercase?
Why are small letters referred to as lowercase and capital letters?
Do all languages have capital letters?
When did the word capital letter come out?
Did Roman inscriptions have capital letters?
Jul 24, 2020 · To unmask the origin of the capital letter, we need to refer to a script derived from the Old Roman cursive called uncial. The word is derived from the Latin uncialis meaning “of an inch, of an ounce.” Uncial used only uppercase letters. That’s what’s known as a majuscule script.
The name Carolingian comes from Charlemagne, King of the Franks, who was ruler during the time that this particular writing form appeared and who helped make it the standard for writing across Europe. The phrase “capital letter,” though, didn’t appear until the 14th century CE.
Feb 27, 2015 · 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.
Jun 7, 2017 · Small letters, which were used the majority of the time, were kept in the lower, easier to access case. Where as large letters were kept in the upper. Also interesting to note is that capitalization belongs to the script, not the language.
Aug 12, 2019 · The capital letters were in the top one — the “upper case.” Over time, the alignment of the metal type within the cases evolved further; by the late 1800s, for example, typesetters used a box where the upper case letters sat to the right of the lower case ones. But by then, the new names for big and little letters had stuck.
Apr 4, 2022 · Specifically, the writing system that eventually evolved into the Latin alphabet emerged in Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq. Within centuries, written language was spreading across the region, as laws were written and disseminated, workers' wages were recorded, trades were carried out, and so on.
Sep 30, 2020 · But where do the opaque terms uppercase and lowercase come from? To understand why capital letters are “uppercase”—and their smaller counterparts are “lowercase”—one has to look back in history to early handwriting and follow that tale to the printing press .
