5 ms·

No concept of case is also true of Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and if I'm not mistaken, most South Asian scripts as well. There are an incredible amount of other

by dheera 6y ago

No concept of case is also true of Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and if I'm not mistaken, most South Asian scripts as well. There are an incredible amount of other ways to add emphasis in Chinese though, so it's not lacking anything, and I imagine the same is true of the other languages.

10000truths 6y ago
Arabic script has a vaguely similar concept of a given letter having multiple (up to 3) forms. The form depends on what letters precede and/or succeed it (if any).
- kingofpandora 6y ago
  That has nothing to do with emphasis though.
  - efreak 6y ago
    Neither do uppercase letterforms. Uppercase individual letters aren't emphasized, that's just grammar, much like Hebrew's final letters that are only used at the end of words (I'm guessing these indicated the ends of words to assist reading when spacing wasn't used--I've certainly found it useful as such).
davchana 6y ago
Gurmukhi script also has no case difference, but has something like symbols, which adds sounds like nn ann, u in put or cut
spijdar 6y ago
And it's worth mentioning how relatively recently case was "invented" even for Latin and Greek/Greek-derived scripts (including Cyrillic, and probably Latin itself technically...) The way we write modern text is more modern than most people realize, I think. The letter 'j' wasn't really used as a separate letter indicating a separate sound until sometime around the 16th century I think! Case is older, but not ancient. I've seen some Greek on 3rd/4th century middle eastern ruins and I struggle to read the "all upper case with no spaces" writing sometimes, but that's just how it was! No "lower case" until much later...
- Talanes 6y ago
  The characters we think of as lower case were starting to take familiar forms around the 3rd century, but they were just the handwritten form of the language. One set of letters with clear sharp lines that can be worked into stone, and another with curves that can be quickly handwritten.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > One set of letters with clear sharp lines that can be worked into stone This was never a goal; look at B ϴ O P Φ Ψ Ω, or on the Latin end C G Q R S. Inscriptions are very formal; you carve the letters you have no matter what they look like. There was never any difficulty carving curves. Handwriting is informal; you write whatever you find easiest.
dhosek 6y ago
Case is a uniquely European script phenomenon, and one that came late in the development of most of the scripts (Cyrillic, because it was the last of the European scripts to be developed has the shortest time between its unicameral origins and the development of upper- and lowercase). I have a book published in the 1920s with a forward by Stanley Morison, by an author who attempted to enhance the Hebrew alphabet by introducing upper and lower case letterforms to it as well as to bring the letter forms more in line with the styles of the Latin-Greek-Cyrillic alphabets. It's—odd.
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  > I have a book published in the 1920s with a forward by Stanley Morison, by an author who attempted to enhance the Hebrew alphabet by introducing upper and lower case letterforms to it as well as to bring the letter forms more in line with the styles of the Latin-Greek-Cyrillic alphabets. It's—odd. Before the eventual standardization of Hangul around early 20th century there were numerous attempts to "linearize" Hangul's characteristic syllabic blocks ("풀어쓰기" [1]). Many of them were influenced by Western alphabets and had two cases, and none were successful. And yes, they are also odd. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Linear_Korean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Linear_Korean
  - dhosek 6y ago
    When I was an undergrad, I wrote some algorithms for composing Hangul letters into the "ideographs" in Metafont. It was kind of fun to build. The whole east-Asian font project was too ambitious and never got finished though. I was trying to enable algorithmic composition not just of Hangul but also Kanji/Hanzi from radicals but the latter was not as amenable to algorithmic composition.

by dheera 6y ago

10000truths 6y ago

Arabic script has a vaguely similar concept of a given letter having multiple (up to 3) forms. The form depends on what letters precede and/or succeed it (if any).

kingofpandora 6y ago
That has nothing to do with emphasis though.
- efreak 6y ago
  Neither do uppercase letterforms. Uppercase individual letters aren't emphasized, that's just grammar, much like Hebrew's final letters that are only used at the end of words (I'm guessing these indicated the ends of words to assist reading when spacing wasn't used--I've certainly found it useful as such).

davchana 6y ago

Gurmukhi script also has no case difference, but has something like symbols, which adds sounds like nn ann, u in put or cut

spijdar 6y ago

And it's worth mentioning how relatively recently case was "invented" even for Latin and Greek/Greek-derived scripts (including Cyrillic, and probably Latin itself technically...) The way we write modern text is more modern than most people realize, I think. The letter 'j' wasn't really used as a separate letter indicating a separate sound until sometime around the 16th century I think! Case is older, but not ancient. I've seen some Greek on 3rd/4th century middle eastern ruins and I struggle to read the "all upper case with no spaces" writing sometimes, but that's just how it was! No "lower case" until much later...

Talanes 6y ago
The characters we think of as lower case were starting to take familiar forms around the 3rd century, but they were just the handwritten form of the language. One set of letters with clear sharp lines that can be worked into stone, and another with curves that can be quickly handwritten.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > One set of letters with clear sharp lines that can be worked into stone This was never a goal; look at B ϴ O P Φ Ψ Ω, or on the Latin end C G Q R S. Inscriptions are very formal; you carve the letters you have no matter what they look like. There was never any difficulty carving curves. Handwriting is informal; you write whatever you find easiest.

dhosek 6y ago

Case is a uniquely European script phenomenon, and one that came late in the development of most of the scripts (Cyrillic, because it was the last of the European scripts to be developed has the shortest time between its unicameral origins and the development of upper- and lowercase). I have a book published in the 1920s with a forward by Stanley Morison, by an author who attempted to enhance the Hebrew alphabet by introducing upper and lower case letterforms to it as well as to bring the letter forms more in line with the styles of the Latin-Greek-Cyrillic alphabets. It's—odd.

lifthrasiir 6y ago
> I have a book published in the 1920s with a forward by Stanley Morison, by an author who attempted to enhance the Hebrew alphabet by introducing upper and lower case letterforms to it as well as to bring the letter forms more in line with the styles of the Latin-Greek-Cyrillic alphabets. It's—odd. Before the eventual standardization of Hangul around early 20th century there were numerous attempts to "linearize" Hangul's characteristic syllabic blocks ("풀어쓰기" [1]). Many of them were influenced by Western alphabets and had two cases, and none were successful. And yes, they are also odd. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Linear_Korean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Linear_Korean
- dhosek 6y ago
  When I was an undergrad, I wrote some algorithms for composing Hangul letters into the "ideographs" in Metafont. It was kind of fun to build. The whole east-Asian font project was too ambitious and never got finished though. I was trying to enable algorithmic composition not just of Hangul but also Kanji/Hanzi from radicals but the latter was not as amenable to algorithmic composition.