Information about Letter Case

In orthography and typography, letter case (or just case) is the distinction between majuscule (capital or upper-case) and minuscule (lower-case) letters. The term originated with the shallow drawers called type cases still used to hold the movable type for letterpress printing.

Most Occidental languages (certainly those based on the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Armenian alphabets) use multiple letter cases in their written form as an aid to clarity. In addition, some computer programming languages use letter case to distinguish between special words, while others ignore case altogether.

In English, capital letters are used as the first letter of a sentence or a proper noun and for initials or acronyms. The first person pronoun "I" and the interjection "O" are also capitalised. Lower-case letters are normally used for all other purposes. There are however situations where further capitalisation may be used to give added emphasis, for example in headings and titles or to PICK OUT certain words (often using small capitals). There are also a few pairs of words of different meanings whose only difference is capitalization of the first letter. Other languages vary in their use of capitals. For example, in German the first letter of all nouns is capitalised.

If an alphabet has case, all or nearly all letters have both a majuscule and minuscule form. Both forms in each pair are considered to be the same letter: they have the same name, same pronunciation, and will be treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order. Languages have capitalisation rules to determine whether majuscules or minuscules are to be used in a given context.

An example of a letter without both forms is the German ß (ess-tsett), which exists only in minuscule. When capitalised it normally becomes two letters, "SS" (although use of ß as a capital has been deemed permissible according to the recent spelling reform). This is because ß was originally a ligature of the two letters "ſs" (a long s and an s), both of which become "S" when capitalized. It later evolved into a letter in its own right. (ß is also occasionally referred to as a ligature of "sz", which recalls the way this consonant was pronounced in some medieval German dialects. The original spelling "sz" is preserved in Hungarian, which is pronounced as [s].)

Case comparison

Here is a comparison of the majuscule and minuscule versions of each letter used in the English language. The exact representation will vary according to the font used.

Upper Case:

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z |Lower Case:||a||b||c||d||e||f||g||h||i||j||k||l||m||n||o||p||q||r||s||t||u||v||w||x||y||z

Origins of the term

The terms upper case and lower case originated in the early days of the printing press used with movable type in letterpress printing. The individual type blocks used in hand typesetting are stored in shallow wooden or metal drawers, known as cases, with subdivisions into compartments known as boxes to store each individual letter. In many countries the majuscules and minuscules are stored separately, with a pair of boxes for each typeface at a specific size. For typesetting, the two cases are taken out of the storage rack and placed on a rack on the compositor's desk. By convention, the case containing the capitals (and small capitals) stands at a steeper angle at the back of the desk, with the case for the small letters, punctuation and spaces, at a shallower angle below it to the front of the desk, hence upper and lower case.^[1]

Various patterns of cases are available, often with the compartments for lower case letters varying in size according to the frequency of use of letters, so that the commonest letters are grouped together in larger "boxes" at the centre of the case.^[1] The compositor takes the letter blocks from the compartments and places them in a composing stick, working from left to right and placing the letters upside down with the "nick" to the top, then sets the assembled type in a "galley".

The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles (reprinted 1952) indicates that this usage of "case" (as the box or frame used by a compositor in the printing trade) was first used in 1588. Originally one large case was used for each typeface, then "Divided cases", pairs of cases for upper and lower case, were introduced in Belgium by 1563, England by 1588, and France before 1723. Though pairs of cases were used in English speaking countries and many European countries in Germany and Scandinavia the single case continued in use.^[1]

Other forms of case

The distinction between hiragana and katakana in Japanese is similar to, but not the same as, case. While each sound has both a hiragana and katakana, any given word will use only one of the two scripts normally. If a word is written with hiragana, it is not normally considered correct to write it with katakana, and vice versa. However, katakana may be substituted for hiragana or kanji to add emphasis or make them stand out, similar to the use of capitalisation or italics in English.

Also similar to case is recent usage in Georgian, where some authors use isolated letters from the Asomtavruli alphabet within a text otherwise written in Mkhedruli in a fashion that is reminiscent of modern usage of letter case in the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets.

Importance of case in the identification of scripts

As briefly discussed in Unicode Technical Note #26,^[2] "In terms of implementation issues, any attempt at a unification of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic would wreak havoc [and] make casing operations an unholy mess, in effect making all casing operations context sensitive [...]". In other words, while the shapes of letters like A, B, E, H, K, M, O, P, T, X, Y and so on are shared between the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets (and small differences in their canonical forms may be considered to be of a merely typographical nature), it would still be problematic for a multilingual character set or a font to provide only a single codepoint for, say, uppercase letter B, as this would make it quite difficult for a wordprocessor to change that single uppercase letter to one of the three different choices for the lower case letter, b (Latin), β (Greek), or в (Cyrillic). Without letter case, a 'unified European alphabet'—such as ABБCГDΔΕZЄЗFΦGГHIИJ...Z, with an appropriate subset for each language—is feasible; but considering letter case, it becomes very clear that these alphabets are rather distinct sets of symbols.

See also

• Sentence case
• Capitalisation
• Unicase

References