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Latin mxedruli, or do we really need capital and small letters?

From:Danny Wier <dawiertx@...>
Date:Tuesday, May 25, 2004, 1:38
A thought I've been mulling over for years. I've noticed a lot of people
raised in countries or regions where the written language does not
distinguish cases (Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Chinese, Korean, Japanese etc.)
type their English e-mails out in small letters. Obviously that doesn't make
them unreadable, just strange-looking, especially the uncapitalized 'i' (the
fact that 'I' is normally capitalized makes English kinda Egocentric, don't
it?)

There is precedent for abandoning a two-case system: Georgian. In fact, the
entire alphabet was redesigned so that _mxedruli_ only slightly resembles
the old _xutsuri_. Not quite as radical a change as Grantha/Tamil from
Devanagari or Arabic from Aramaic, obviously, but still a big change.

I'm not so familiar with the history of capitalization; all I know is that
older Greek and Latin documents (the Bible, for example) only capitalize
proper names and not even the first words of sentences. English is more
liberal than most modern Latin/Greek/Cyrillic/Armenian languages in
capitalization but not as much as German, which gives every Noun a big
Letter.

So my two questions:

1) If your conlangs are written in two-case alphabets/abjads/syllabries,
what are the rules?

2) Sometime in the more-or-less distant future, could European languages (or
'LGCA' languages I call them, analogous to the term 'CJK' used by Unicoders)
adopt single-case alphabets, and if so, would it be a 'third case' like
_mxedruli_ in Georgian, simplified in form? If so, what would they look
like? I've actually worked on such a model for Latin, using the Moon
tactographic alphabet as a major influence:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/moon.htm.

~Danny~ Si hoc legere scis, nimium eruditionis habes.

Reply

Barbara Barrett <barbarabarrett@...>Novus Scriptio [was: capitolisation]