CAPS Unlock - the history behind uppercase & lowercase letters
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- Опубліковано 23 сер 2024
- The ancient alphabet was a single scratchy list of letters. So where did BIG UPPERCASE and little lowercase forms of our alphabet come from?
Take a look at the history of our strange writing system and wonder...
Who came first? Was it those rambunctious CAPITALIZERS or the fancy but timid minusculizers?
Who made scripts join forces to form one superalphabet? Roman soldiers? Medieval scribes? Are camels to blame for CamelCase?
Why does something about these letters remind me of Arabic, even though Arabic doesn't capitalize its letters?
Word of the day: bicameral. Sorry, BiCaMeRaL. You'll see.
CREDITS
Art, animation and music by NativLang
~ CC-BY and Public Domain images ~
Greek inscription at Korykian, Zde
Forum inscription with lizard, Anthony M from Rome
Carolingian minuscule, Beinecke Digital Collections
Codex Aureus, Vitold Muratov
Mt. Athos Dionys. Cod. 587
Cyril and Methodius, Radek Linner
Old Bulgarian alphabet, Vakots7
Russian Azbuka Benois
Oifig na bPassana, Jnestorius
Syriac Sertâ manuscript, Schøyen Collection MS 577
Any CC-BY stuff not mentioned here is listed in the credits for Thoth's Pill:
docs.google.co...
Thank you for your kind words, encouragement and your excitement about language!
Fun fact: Ancient people did, in fact, have lower case letters. They just didn't use them because everyone spoke exclusively by yelling. :P
the Old Testament becomes quite different when you imagine everyone yelling all the time
"THE LORD IS GRACIOUS AND COMPASSIONATE, SLOW TO ANGER AND RICH IN LOVE!!!"
OUR GOD IN HEAVEN, HALLOWED BE THY NAME!
John Doe yeah THAT *would* be GREAT
It's the official language of crowded places and the dinner table. The louder you speak, the more important your statement is.
Dude, I have to limit myself to only watching one of your videos per day because I have to get stuff done
Haha! Well I'll try to release more frequently so as to lure you from work...
And you will probably succeed, and since I have your attention: Esperanto
Ooh... wise man. Thank you!
ua-cam.com/video/gXVtiN3XbBU/v-deo.html
@@NativLangBut what about unicameral/unicase/caseless letters? They can be found even if they are in a bicase script, such as the Cryllic Palochka. The term means that said letter is neither uppercase nor lowercase.
FUN FACT! The Greek letter sigma has three forms: a capital form (Σ), a normal lowercase form (σ), and a second lowercase form that's only used at the end of a word (ς). ISN'T THAT INTERESTING?!
Not really. Get used to it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
I found it interesting when I discovered that. ☺ And it's been in use for thousands of years.
Greek script is beautiful, while complex. I love how rounded it is in comparison to Latin.
GMovieSeeker I've always been a big fan of Arabic script. It makes every sentence look like a work of art.
Just found your channel. I really like your art style. I'm jealous! Ha. Subscribed.
+Political Junkie News Well, thank you! I'm glad you found me, and VERY glad to hear the extra time I spend animating is worth it!
"centuries worth of all-caps rage..." This is why they were always fighting! They were constantly yelling at each other in print!
Cyril and Methodius didn't create the Cyrillic alphabet, they created the Glagolitic alphabet. Their students, who were Bulgarians, created the Cyrillic alphabet.
Also they are Macedonian!
Martin Kocankovski Well, considering that there was no Macedonia back then and that the territory on which it is now was part of Bulgaria back then, they couldn't have been Macedonian.
+indjev99 cool story.. Do u know who Alexander Macedonian The Great is? No? well he made Macedonia all the way to africa and arabia. Search for history, learn than talk. PS: i really dont wanna start a feud cause of misunderstanding.
Alexander the Great was Greek. macedonia back then was greek state like sparta or athens. now there are two Macedonias one northern greek province and the other slavic country. Alexander the Great was not slav he was macedonian who at the time were greek
macedonia is bulgaria
It is generally taught that minuscule appears only in middle ages, but there were Roman Cursive that had many minuscule forms long before. Also talking about "cyrillic" you may want to check their cursive which is quite a "very distinct lower case forms"
+mahead True, there are surviving examples of Latin cursive from very early.
I wouldn't say that Russian cursive has very distinct uppercase and lowercase, but some letters are good counterexamples. It's definitely more varied than printed Cyrillic.
Thanks for watching and commenting!
NativLang, as a native speaker of Russian I must say that the cursive upper and lower cases are very distinct, at least in most letters. Not everyone uses them anymore, the young almost always write in block letters, but still most people have no problem with cursive writing.
Here's proof:
mad-man.ru/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/propis-2.jpg
In Serbian cyrillic some minuscule letters are just smaller capital letters, but some are different (for example A and a, like in the Latin script)
NativLang So i have a question I hope someone Will be able to answer, I've been wondering about it for years:
Some letters are very different in their capital, minuscule and cursive forms. In most cases that is explained (such as Aa Bb Dd Rr..)
However that's not always the case:
First the Gg has multiple forms, including the weirdish form seen in most fonts. Both forms are kind of hard to explain, as I'm not sure about the intermediary forms (as there are also the insular g and the yogh letter)
Second, the lowercase n is strange: its traits are mirrored comparéd to the capital.
Third, while Wikipedia explains the existence of the lowercase r, there is also a cursive square-shaped r which is very different from Any other form.
Could anyone explain to me the évolution of these three letters? Please, that's important, I've wondering since I was like 6 or so
I always remember when I was an exchange student in Japan, and some students were saying how Japanese was stupid for having two types of kana and was fed up with learning two alphabets for the same sounds. And one guy just got mad at all these complaints and made us see that upper and lower-case WERE just like two alphabets and it would be just as hard for someone that has never seen the Roman alphabet to learn it.
It’s not a perfect analogy. A lot of the lowercase letters really are smaller versions of the upper case ones. Please stop ranting.
What about Kanji though
@Isidora Espinoza Yep. However, discounting ”Rōmaji” (which is kind of for lazy people), Japanese has zero alphabets, it has a logography (”Kanji”) and two syllabaries (”Kana”). Otherwise I pretty much agree. Those students’ complaints were pretty unwarranted, though, since the ”Kana”’s would probably be the easiest part of Japanese.
@Adiel Wilson That’s, where the ”fun” begins.
@A Random Comment I get, where you’re coming from; but he really wasn’t ranting.
Interesting, I've always wondered at which point we shifted to using both majuscule and minuscule letters. As for the Glagolitic/Cyrillic alphabets, the Glagolitic one was created for all slavs by Cyril & Methodius, whereas the Cyrillic one was developed specifically for use in the First Bulgarian Empire (in the literary school of Preslav). Some other commenters seem unable to make this distinction :)
1:49 It is wrong that Cyrillic never developed very distinct lower case letters. They're very different in most cases, but not for the type of script used on computers.
yeah. cursive cyrillic looks entirely different from computer cyrillic.
Б vs б.
The б is somewhat different, so it could be considered distinct.
From what I've seen in calligraphy classes, in Latin-using cultures the majuscule evolved into minuscule naturally, while the Cyrillic scripts stuck to majuscule. Then, in 18 century, the alphabet was reshaped for more European standards, including the separation of uppercase and lowercase. And so Cyrillic lowercase looks very clunky sometimes - because a lot of the time it's basically an uppercase letter made smaller :)
if you look at written alphabet there is a huge difference between lower case and capital letters.
It is also worth mentioning that there's Russian typography and Bulgarian typography. It's Russian typography that doesn't differentiate a lot between upper and lower case letters (e.g. Т and т in Russian typography vs T and m in Bulgarian)
Dude - thank you so so SO much for so often including Irish in your videos - I am very much interested in language and a huge UA-cam fan and so I've watched many videos on the subject here and literally only once EVER have I had the pleasure of seeing a mention of my countries mother tongue in a video - that is until now. In just the last ten minutes watching your videos I have been delighted by the sight of not one or two but three examples of an teanga gaelige up on screen! This has made me really really happy !..
Go raibh míle míle Maith Agat s chara as An Cathair Chorcaí - Éire :) !!
Tá fáilte romhat, a chara! I took university Irish with a wonderful professor, so I'm nothing but thrilled when I find a chance to give a nod to the language.
Nice video. I remember when I first had to learn English I thought it was so strange and kind of arrogant that you capitalize I but not the other pronouns. In German I (ich) is lowercase but you (Sie) is capitalized if you want to be polite. ;)
+Akhilleus That is a strange idiosyncrasy. Of course, English was once like German in that regard (ic or, later, i). Thanks for watching!
+NativLang It happened because "i" all alone is so thin and short that it is easy to miss - especially in the early part of the Middke Ages, before "i" got its dot.
more interesting is, why is a capital letter considered polite? What is 'polite' about it?
I imagine it's because the capital letter signifies some kind of importance, as the video mentioned. It's the same reason why it's common in English for "you" to be capitalized when the addressee is God, although in German it doesn't imply nearly so much respect.
Another reason for the capitalization in this case might be that if you don't capitalize the formal/polite versions of "you", they're identical to the third-person plural pronouns ("they", "them", and "their"). The capitalization distinguishes them in their written forms, although they don't sound any different. As for why "Sie" came to be a polite way to address someone, I have no idea. In English, I would interpret using the word "They" instead of "you" to mean the speaker is ignoring the other person's presence, and the capitalization could mean extreme respect, fear, or the feeling that the other person is significantly different and should be shunned for it. But I'm sure it made sense to the people who first started using "Sie" in that way.
kha sab In German it isn’t the capital that makes it polite. The word “Sie” means the formal singular or plural you. The word “sie” means she. The informal singular you is “du”, the informal plural “ihr”
I wish we had the German--capitalise all nouns every time.
"The Boy is drinking the Water from Fiji, the Girl is eating an Apple from Australia".
no i don't want that
@@punor Yes, you do
I am currently reading "Urne Buriall" by Sir Thomas Browne, pub. 1658, with the original spelling, punctuation and capitalization. Not every noun is capitalized - I think at this time English had gotten away from 'capitalize all the nouns' to 'capitalize the nouns you want to emphasize'. Scattering big Letters hither and yon across the Page does have a different feel and it is effective in drawing the Eye to the emphasized words. However, I do find the lack of rules a little unsettling.
Well, eating an apple is all well and good, but eating an Apple might hurt your mouth, especially if it's aluminium.
People used to write that way in Early Modern English. It just fell out of fashion. But you can see it in some texts like the original A Modest Proposal.
You sir are one of the few people who can make language and learning fun, please keep it up as you are doing a service for mankind!
Videos like this, made by you and other quality content creators, are why I absolutely adore _UA-cam._ It represents the absolute best of the platform. The polar opposite of the Logan Paul's, the mindless, and perhaps even damaging, videos. Thank you so much for the work you do and the videos you provide.
I've just subscribed. I've been following your videos as the YT suggestions appear, but I don't want to miss any. Brilliant job and thank you very much indeed. Best regards, from a Spanish language native.
The IMFI thing actually looks really cool. You modify each letter to make the word look beautiful. Can you please make a video on the Arabic script?
Mongol does the same thing. Both scripts look amazing (even if they're very hard for me to write)
All your videos are a pleasure not only for their intellectual content but for their humorous, and appealing esthetics. Another major factor in your A+ videos is your voice friendly teacher. It is so, well, just so cool! It is authentically intelligent, friendly, and pleasant. You love what you do and that honest enjoyment adds immensely to your shared scholarship. Thank you.
At 0:50 , btw, upper-case letters in french is "lettres en majuscule"
You have an impressive knack for telling stories and making the viewer part of that story :) I'm really enjoying these.
I was hoping you would mention where we get the term "upper case" and "lower case" from (the printing press)
When I hand-set type in 7th grade shop class (1962-63), I remember that the capital letters were in the upper cases and the regular letters were in the lower cases that were more easily and more often used. Hence the names: uppercase and lowercase!
@@mkworkman And if you spilled the case, you 'pied the type'. Since the characters are mirrored, sorting out the 'p', 'd', 'q' and 'b' characters could leave you 'pie eyed' so you had to mind your '"P's and Q's". (Son of a printer here.)
Only relevant for english though. The rest of the world have more refined words for it :p
@Mike Workman I thought it would be something like that. Even today, in games, where you have to type in your name for a high score, or a password, or what have you, you typically have a box of upper-case letters on top and, below it, you have box of lower-case letters.
oKAy, wELl WhAt aBOuT tHIs PhENoMeNOn ThEn? is this so called "meme" another Major Moments in The History of Writing??
Spongebob-scule.
It's called camel case.
I dunno. That just seems obnoxious.
There Are Of Course, Other, Options....
sOME mORE sENSIBLE tHAN oTHERS...
But I recall a lot of use of CamelCase in programming.
Here however it has a more sensible function that just rANdoMly capitalising things...
Essentially it seems to be to aid readability in compound statements, since you cannot use spaces.
Of course, you could use something like this:
fire_control_setup_fast
But, you could equally write FireControlSetupFast and...
Well that's mostly a matter of opinion, but it just... Looks... Nicer?
meh.
Don't get me started on Hungarian notation...
AFAIK that has absolutely nothing to do with Hungary, it's just a name given to a particular way of naming things that you often see used alongside CamelCase;
bGetHungerIndex
sSetControl
iReallyAmGettingTiredOfThinkingOfContrivedOutOfContextVariableNames
That kind of thing...
@@KuraIthys Programming language is a different language than English, so that has completely different rules.
@KuraIthys The ”Spongebob-scule” script *IS* obnoxious; no two ways around it.
LOL, "That's right, _centuries worth_ of ALL-CAPS rage.", "maniacally cursive scripts"... Good balance between entertainment and information in this one.
I love how you brought up Irish Gaelic examples!! It's an awesome example of weird capitalization. It's an awesome language :P
+Christian Shousha Cinnte go bhfuil!
Sin fíor a rá
Lower and mixed case makes reading easier at the limit of resolution or focus. Words have a distinct shape with tails sticking out at the top or bottom. I can often guess a word in English or other Latin-based language knowing the context. All capitals or Cyrillic script is harder to read when an unresolvable word becomes a solid bar. The Cyrillic italic/cursive is better, apart from the fact that some borrowed Latin letters substitute for entirely different ones (g -> d, u -> i, m -> t)
this is one of those surprisingly interesting things. im hooked.
this is me asking more than telling. English has 26 letters, (or 27 if you count &. most don't in the modern day.)
each letter has four forms. print lower and upper, cursive lower and upper.
when did print and cursive get distinguished? is one just for writing on paper and the other for stone etc, originally?
I don't know for sure (and I'm too lazy to google it) but I think the distinction came with the prining press, with printed scripts being the more difficult to write by hand scrips which were easy to use in printing (hence the name).
+MutedAjar thanks. makes sense. I assume that print is the "official" means of writing a letter and different fonts and cursive as a whole emerged from hand writing changing letters slightly over time.
I know that you can see the print form of the letter in every cursive way of writing it. even the ones you don't think of ovbiously see it in, like S and Z for example.
Actually, that's a bit more complex than that. Even in the Roman times there was the majuscule script reserved for inscriptions and such and the cursive script, used for everyday purposes on wax tablets. Later the situation was largely the same, the majuscule, minuscule and bicameral writing existed alongside quicker, cursive (from Latin currere - to run) variations.
Be aware that even English had already had almost 700 years of written history beore printing came along. Earliest typefaces were modeled to look like contemporary handwriting, and slanted 'cursive' types, easily distinguishable in print switched their use to denote emphasis.
We only assume priting typefaces are prototypical because we grew up in the age of print.
+Ryan Houk I hope that +NativLang will do an episode on cursive.
I've always thought, but I'm out on a limb here, that cursive started from fast or sloppy writing. You know, being too much in a hurry or too lazy to pick up the pen and lower it again for every stroke. Perhaps NativLang will explain that in a future video.
your videos are very informative. and I love it! can you feature a video explaining why some language writings starts on the right instead of starting on the left. thanks a lot!
Very educational. That's one more thing to tell others and make them wonder :"Why does he know this?" :D
In Ancient Rome you can see the beginnings of many of the miniscule letters forms in Latin Cursive, the script that developed among everyday Romans for writing letters, shopping lists, party invites, etc. and probably the script in which most of the books written in the Western half of the Empire were originally penned (or incised on wax tablets). I'm guessing based purely on how similar they are that it influenced Carolingian, particularly in small a, b, p, h, o, and q. Your videos are fantastic!
Two bits of Irish in one vide!
Yeees so great, right? :D
TRiG (Ireland) bhí mé ar bís nuair a chonaic mé é sin
So much alliteration! Love it
While we're on the subject of bicameral scripts, what do you think of tlhIngan Hol (Klingon) using uppercase letters Only for syllable emphasis?
From your example at 0:38, they also had kerning. Way to go! Early typography!
DO OTHER LANGUAGES USE THE DIFFERENT VARIATIONS OF LETTERS TO INDICATE EMOTIONAL QUALITY TOO?
I think *bolding* has the same effect. I saw it used occasionally in a Hebrew translation of _The Fault in Our Stars_.
I never got why ALL-CAPS is a thing to indicate screaming as we have "¡!" And "¡¡¡!!!" as exclamation and Spanish inverted-exclamation marks.
The idea of ALL CAPS being the equivalent of "shouting" is extremely recent. It's a product of the age of the Internet and text messaging.
No, actually - all-caps has been used for SHOUTING in published writing for many decades. All-caps creates emphasis on a word; as we read, we "hear" the emphasis as increased "loudness." Italics creates a _slight_ emphasis, all caps creates a LARGER emphasis, and when (say) a character wants to cry out from their very soul with all the emphasis possible, they will utilize _BOTH_ ! (As well as throwing in an exclamation point or two.)
NO, SHINY AEON: IF YOU WANT TO *CRY OUT* FROM YOUR _VERY SOUL,_ YOU MUST USE ITALICS, CAPS-LOCK *_AND BOLD_* AND ADD IN *_AT LEAST EIGHT_* EXCLAMATION POINTS WITH ONE OR TWO ONES ON THE END!!!!!!!!!!!11
Great video! Keep going!
What is clear is that minuscules were the first optimized form of hand writing for greek-latin alphabets. One case you missed here is Hebrew, where you have a "printed" or "decorative" form of the characters and a handwritten one, with some letters having different shapes for their final forms. Here there is no notion at all of upper and lower case.
One more question on language history (for the Toth´s Pills): when the writing direction changed from right-to-left to left-to-right? It makes me think that the original ancient scholars should have been mostly left-handed as RTL is the natural way of writing with the left hand.
When I hand-set type in 7th grade shop class (1962-63), I remember that the capital letters were in the upper cases and the regular letters were in the lower cases that were more easily and more often used. Hence the names: uppercase and lowercase!
Why do you not have more subs? You make this really fun to learn
Great video! Not much more to say, really.
+mac5565 Thanks! I'm glad to answer this lingering question!
Your vid on Georgian obsessed on consonant clusters but overlooked another complication: they use THREE Alphabets!
The one you mention, mxedruli (chivalric) is the most commonly used for secular texts. Shot’a Rustaveli’s epic Vepxistxaosani is written in mxedruli.
The other two scripts are Asomtavruli, a majuscule for inscriptions as in stone, and nusxuri (hooky) which is exclusive to ecclesiastical use, for euchologia and chant books. No Georgian churchman can function without knowing it.
Imagine if we had upper case and lower case numbers...
We had that, we just don't use them anymore, numbers in Wikipedia article names are written this way though
Funny about Cyrillic; while only five letters have distinct lower-case forms in print, most of them do in actual handwriting. So it seems that for whatever reason, they mostly ignored the handwritten forms when arriving at their printed standard.
Actually, cyrillic did develop into a distinct (and harder to read) cursive script. With some imagination you can see the likeness between I and u or T and m (hint: the T is in the middle of the m).
Living in a Sate with a Unicameral legislature and having come from a State with a Bicameral one, after living in a Canadian Province with a Unicameral Legislative Assembly, I didn;t learn the word 'bicameral' in this video, but I did hear it used in reference to typography for the first time.
Speaking about Carolingian characters you forgot talking about Cental, which was a widely spread minuscule writing system from about VI to XI century when the Carolingian Empire enforced the new writing system.
HELLO CVIS HOV ARE YVV DOINC
THE REFERENCE, I COT IT. VVELL DONE.
VVV*
I FEEL COOD
I CAN NOT BELIEVE I CAN WRITE A SENTENCE LIKE IN ANCIENT ENCLISH WITHOYT CHANCINC ANYTHINC...NEVERMIND
Fine. Just drank my healthy, daily dose of lead and wine. Never felt so good.
So i have a question I hope someone Will be able to answer, I've been wondering about it for years:
Some letters are very different in their capital, minuscule and cursive forms. In most cases that is explained (such as Aa Bb Dd Rr..)
However that's not always the case:
First the Gg has multiple forms, including the weirdish form seen in most fonts. Both forms are kind of hard to explain, as I'm not sure about the intermediary forms (as there are also the insular g and the yogh letter)
Second, the lowercase n is strange: its traits are mirrored comparéd to the capital.
Third, while Wikipedia explains the existence of the lowercase r, there is also a cursive square-shaped r which is very different from Any other form.
Could anyone explain to me the évolution of these three letters? Please, that's important, I've wondering since I was like 6 or so
Someonestolemyspacebutton
In Cyrillic script (minuscule) is exist a few variants for letters in begin/middle of words and in end/isolated form. By example, letter /v/ (в) in beginning and inside words has written with a connect curve to next letter, but in end or isolated it has not. And this is true for that letters: в, о, р, ф, ч, щ, ю. For other letters it's written form is similar for both cases (inside/outside).
The music toward the end reminded me of the background music in Age of Empires and AoE: Rise of Rome games.
In many alphabets, lower case letters do not exist, e.g. in Arabic, Hebrew, Georgian, etc.
You should mention the two forms of the letter 'g' at some point. A lot of people don';t even seem to notice that there are two different glyphs in widespread use for lowercase g in different fonts.
My English handwriting is in IMFI script and no one, not even me, knows why. Especially the letters E, H, R, and G. And I always use a lowercase cursive K and a lowercase Cyrillic D when printing, and I also don't know why. (well, my second grade teacher used a lowercase cursive K instead of a printed lowercase K, so I guess I know why I do that one)
Having lived in Canada, where the Federal Parliament is bicameral, and all Provincial Legislatures are unicameral, and living now in the only US state with a unicameral Legislature, which we call simply 'the Unicameral', I've known and used 'bicameral' for years. Didn't know it made me sound smarter! LOL!
I've been wondering this for so long!
The word "bicameral" should already flow off the tongues of many Americans and other English-speakers in countries whose legislatures have two houses.
I would love to see a video on what languages are the easiest to write or can be written the fastest.
I didn't realise that, it must be so hard for people from other scripts to pick up capital letters!
How about the cursive writing? When and why it was used?
Another fun one: German handwriting used to use a unique script, which I believe is more closely related to gothic blackletter than to English cursive script? Much like how Japanese, German would use its native Kurrent script for German, but would use English cursive alongside for writing foreign languages.
Yeah, It had its exclusive ligatures for letters that often go together in the language.
The letter capital I is not just a thin, vertical rectangle, but on the top and the bottom it has those little horizontal thingies. Where do they come from?
Did you make a video on modern cursive handwriting, like in cyrillic? 'cause you're not mentioning it in this one and I think it's worth talking about looking at the trickery of it (in regard to the older or printing one) :)
Recently I've been getting back into calligraphy, with an interest in book-copying in 14th and 15th century styles. Turns out that medieval scribes were lazy and often used "scribal abbreviation" little marks above and below certain letters or letter
combinations to represent syllables or indeed, entire words. Perhaps this would he an interesting subject for a NativLang video?
In modern internet text, capitals and lowercase indicate not only proper nouns and starts of sentences, but also (and more commonly) tone. All caps is understood to be shouting, while all lowercase meant deadpan. Mixing the two every single letter (LiKe tHiS) meant sarcasm.
Hey, Where is the old voice of NativLang? It was really good
+srinesh shenoi Jessica, from Thoth's Pill? She'll definitely be doing more videos with us.
I have heard that the names uppercase and lowercase come from the typography era, when the printers would store the majuscule metal letters on the top drawer of the table (the "upper case") and the minuscule letters in the lower drawer, or "lower case". I don't know it that's the case, bu I think that's an interesting story.
This is gold
Cyril and Methodius made alphabet for Great Moravian, not for Bulgaria. It came to Bulgaria with their students. Actually it was not called Cyrilice but Hlaholice and looked quite different (you can also see it in Witcher). Then the students took it to Bulgaria and made it Cyrilic.
THIS WAS A VERY GOOD VIDEOS THANKS
So ancient people invented capslock button?
I need to find out who invented caps lock so that I can go back in time and stop them. (Oh, and yes, I also need to invent a time machine.)
Can you please make a video about the history of the Greek alphabet. I really want to know how it started, and why?
+NativeLang Thank you very much for making this video, a really good follow-up on on _Thot’s Pill_. However, a 2:49, why isn’t the g in ‘german’ capitalised: G? Wasn’t that done in medieval English? Is it a lower case g because German does not capitalise adjectives in the middle of a sentence, even if they are related to a nationality (e.g. Turkish (adj.) -> türkisch)?
Regarding the Cyrillic alphabet, it does make a distinction between some capital letters in print (e.g. Аа, Бб, Іі, Ее). The rest, as you mentioned, are just miniature version of the majuscule letters (e.g. Жж, Шш, Ии) However, in Cyrillic handwriting they are distinct much more. For example, majuscule Д and д have completely different form in handwriting (cursive), д even resembles the Latin letter minuscule g. When learning Russian, this was quite a struggle for me, to learn how to write Russian cursive.
More on the topic of writing systems. I find it interesting that some languages are written in more than one writing system, not only for students learning that language. A great example of this is Serbian (the Serbian dialect of Serbo-Croatian, if you like), that can be written in both the Latin alphabet (_srpski_) and the Cyrillic alphabet (српски). Another, more extreme example of this is Chenchen (Нохчийн мотт / Noxchiin mott / نوٓخچیین موٓتت) which has been written in both the Arabic abjad (before 1925), the Latin alphabet (1925 - ’38, ’92 - ?) and the Cyrillic alphabet (’38 - ’92, present).
Also, as you probably know, there are a lot more aspects of writing than which letters to use. For example, font: there are millions if not billions of fonts know used on computers, some a bit odd, and before computers and typewriters. big and fat letters were used to write languages like English (fraktur). Why and when did we stop using fraktur? Punctuation: when did we begin writing spaces, bracets ( [ { } ] ), emojies, commas, dots, apostrophes, quotation marks and what have you. Why can I write Chinese without spaces (《中華民國目前重未宣佈放棄大陸地區嘅主權》) and not English? WhyCan’tIWriteLikeThis? Why is different punctuations marks used for different languages and even different dialect of the same language (e.g. ‘ ’ for British English and “ ” for American English). I think these would be awesome topics on the subject of writing.
Again, great video, really. I love _Thot’s Phil,_ and this is also very interesting. Thank you very much for making these videos. 😊
Robert Andersson, in fact quite many languages of the former USSR have this history of using Arabic, then Latin, and then Cyrillic and maybe back to Latin. The Soviet state didn't want them to continue with the legacy of old ways and old religion. So they planned the move to Latin in the 1920s, only to stop it and to imprison most researchers who were adapting the writing system to these languages. Then they ordered that everybody switch to Cyrillic.
SALUT ! J'AIME TES VIDÉOS ! L'AMOUR D'AFRIQUE DU SUD ! J'ESSAYE LE FRANÇAIS , MAIS J'ADORE TOUTES LES LANGUES ! AU REVOIR POUR LE MOMENT !
WOW, THIS IS A REALLY COOL HISTORY!
The Phœnician abjad was derived from the earlier and widely spread hlhm .
Cyril and Methodius designed the Glagolitic script for the Prince of Moravia, the Bulgarians revised it to conform to the Greek.
Hebrew, like Arabic, has different forms for some of its letters depending if it's at the start, middle, or the end of a word. For instance, "nun" has two forms: 'ן' AND 'נ'.
'נ' gets used at the start or middle of a word, and 'ן' gets used at the end of the word. Both letters make the same 'n' sound. There are a couple of other letters like that as well.
I've been studying Hebrew a little over the past couple of months, and I had never related that to our practice of capitalisation. After being exposed to a language other than English, I began to question why we did have capitalisation.
At the end of the video, the link in the left to a new video with the i and j does not work.
Happy 1M subscriber!
The funniest thing is that small letters especially don't have a standard. My ts look like thetas and my łs look like ts, my cs and es are almost identical. And then another person comes and writes it differently.
I think it would be a good idea to do “Why do we have Cursive?”
South Arabia developed minuscule script since B.C, called Zabur script
3:47 So, I guess ’hiragana’ and ’katakana’ would also be part of the same phenomenon. 🤔
This is really informative.
0:42 Writing On, Papyrus? UNDERTALE!
When is the full video on the Arabic script's morphing letters coming?
1:08 Oh, so _that's_ where we get the difference between typed "a" and written "a." So, written lowercase "a" is like a lower-lower case.
3:33 awww, it’s all alone and isolated :(
Can you do a video on separation of words in text, meaning if you look at ancient texts the all the letters are close together. I know in ancient times the burden was on the reader to separate words. In Roman times the letters are close to each other, in medieval times there is a switch, Anyway I'm curious about that history and I like your videos so I was thinking that could be a topic
1:05 "Books meant scribes with ink ... smaller, rounder, more fluid forms." A printed black-letter form is not the most compelling example for your argument here.
1:15 Another example of rulers hoarding all the credit to themselves. Charlemagne didn’t invent shit; Alcuin of York did. So, it should be called Alcuinian minuscule script, rather than Carolingian.
You forgot to explain the origins of the actual words "uppercase" and "lowercase". It's something to do with typewriters, right? The top keyboard, or case, had capital letters while the bottom keyboard, or case, was exclusively for lowercase letters?
At some point, you can contrast this with the katakana/hiragana distinction in Japanese.
I wonder whether hiragana will eventually be used for capital letters at the beginning of sentences in katakana... :P
What is there on that papyrus and those two inscriptions?
Also, speaking of Cyrillic, how did the weird shapes of letters like T in cursive pop up?
I think it's because the serifs at the ends of the horizontal top line were exaggerated to the point that they became as long as the vertical stem of the T. Not only does the lower case cursive T look like a Latin cursive "m", but the uppercase cursive form of it also has three long vertical lines. Printed Cyrillic would look so much better if all the lowercase letters didn't look like lazy miniature copies of the uppercase forms.
When did they develop italics and underlining to make specific words stand out?
I've read (not the whole thing) but a 1410 manuscript that only uses illuminated capital letters. It seems to me, at least in French, you can find 'modern' typography not a lot later than this, about 1490.
eXCELLENT vIDEO tHANKS!
0:22 Like the lizard
I do this 3:19 when I write cursive. I don’t know about you but I don’t start my j’s, i’s, m’s, and n’s at the bottom if I don’t have to
Can you do any on the history of cursive(s)-as-we-know-it/them?