When the alphabet first popped up in the Mediterranean, it was a single scratchy list of letters.
But now European alphabets have not one but two symbols for each letter: one big uppercase, and one little lowercase.
So, I hear you ask. Why the extra complications? How did this resizing happen?
Gaze at these sternly romantic Latin and Greek inscriptions, with their textured words that sink
shallowly into their crumbling slabs. They look like epitaphs for an ancient civilization.
But narrow your aesthetic focus and look only at the letters. What do you notice? Capital
letters. It’s all capital letters! Big, imposing, monumental capital letters.
Even when they took up softer media, writing on papyrus and parchment, the Greeks and Romans
penned their words with these big letters, this majuscule script. Centuries worth of
all-caps rage. But the rise and reign of Christendom brought with it the ascent of the book. And
books meant scribes with ink flowing from their pens. The large, sharp angles of older
scripts gave way to smaller, rounder, fluid forms. In the late 700’s, Charlemagne invited
the scholar Alcuin of York to his court, and this man shaped up the king’s scribes, developing
and teaching what we know as Carolingian minuscule, the most celebrated early Latin minuscule
or lowercase script. Around the same time,
Greek writers came up with their own running cursive hand full of smaller minuscule letters,
too. Byzantine Greek had a particularly strong minuscule tradition, which dominated its manuscripts
for a thousand years.
Latin and Greek weren’t traveling alone here.
Greek brothers Cyril and Methodius tweaked their alphabet
to make it suitable for Old Bulgarian in the 800s, and so they gave birth to the Cyrillic alphabet.
Now Cyrillic never developed the kind of very distinct lowercase forms found in Latin and
Greek manuscripts, but eventually it did distinguish smaller and larger letter types.
At this point in our story, notice that uppercase scripts and lowercase scripts are different
scripts. We’re not really mixing majuscules with minuscules. So, when did the modern mixing
start?
Bicameral scripts - ones that treat upper and lowercase as variants of the same letter
- were still on the horizon. You can get hints of this system in old writings,
like those larger capital decorated initials that adorn medieval manuscripts.
But bicameral uppercase plus lowercase became the standard when languages written with alphabets
settled on employing minuscule for most text but using the majuscule letters to signal
important information: a big letter at the beginning of a sentence, a big letter at the beginning of a proper name,
or even the start of every single noun. These have all been standards in the history of
English, and the last one still is for German. But not all bicameral siblings agree: should
you capitalize the name of a foreign language or not? Can capitals fall in the middle of
words? Should you even capitalize the first letter of every sentence? Should you write
some things entirely in capitals?
Bicameral scripts don’t have a monopoly on different forms for a single letter. Maybe
we’ll save the details for another day, because I always like doing these comparative asides,
but think about Syriac, and, later - but very
similar to Syriac - Arabic. These cursive scripts don’t have capital letters, but
each of their letters have up to four distinct shapes: initial when the letter connects
to the start of other letters, medial when it connects between two letters, final when
the letter’s connected to the end of other letters, and isolated when it’s all alone.
There’s even a cool acronym for these: they’re IMFI scripts. And while sometimes the difference
between I-M-F-I forms is pretty small, in scripts that are as maniacally
cursive as Syriac and Arabic, it's very important.
So maybe bicameral and IMFI scripts are both part of a broader phenomenon: how a single letter
can have multiple standard variants within a script but still be the same letter in the same script.
It's interesting to think about. It's a good question - thanks for asking it - but
now that we’ve tackled the uppercase and lowercase letter variants, and now that the
word bicameral rolls off your tongue and makes you sound even smarter than you already were,
I want to move onto another story of Latin letter variants. It’s a tale of ancient
and medieval letter modding. Modders!