Letters

The Coronation of Charlemagne by Friedrich Kaulbach
Illiterate promoter of literacy.

Came across this question on Reddit. The answer was so cogent I thought it worth sharing.

Q: Why do some letters have a completely different character when written in uppercase (A/a, R/r, E/e, etc), whereas others simply have a larger version of themselves (S/s, P/p, W/w, etc)?

A: First of all, let's talk about the words 'uppercase' and 'lowercase'. These words come from the early history of printing, when a person called a typesetter would assemble each page of a book letter by letter. Each letter was a profile on a piece of lead, called a sort. The sorts were kept in boxes called typecases, which had compartments for each letter. There would be a typecase for each font (also called a fount), which was a typeface at a specific size, at a specific weight (bold, medium, etc.), in a specific shape (upright, italic, etc.). A typeface is what we nowadays call a font on computers. There were actually two typecases for each font, and they were kept one on top of the other. The one on top was called the upper case, and contained the 'majuscule' letters; the one on the bottom was called the lower case, and contained the 'minuscule' letters. So the proper names for 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' are 'majuscule' and 'minuscule', respectively.

Now, on to your actual question.

Letters are just simple drawings that have phonetic meanings. (In other words, the symbols represent sounds.) The nature of the symbols is affected by the thing the symbols are written on. For example, one of the earliest writing symbols we have is cuneiform, which was written by making marks with a stylus in a piece of clay. The shape of cuneiform marks is strongly determined by the shape of the stylus.

This is important, because the majuscules and minuscules were originally two forms of the Latin alphabet that were used for writing on different materials, and the same thing applies to the Greek alphabet.

Majuscule letters were originally inscriptional, which means they were carved into stone. The Roman emperor Trajan had his military victories depicted on a carved stone column called Trajan's column; at the base of this column is some writing, in the style of Roman square capitals: this style is common on Roman monuments, but Trajan's column is one of the best known examples. These letters were designed by a scribe painting them on to the stone with a brush; a stonemason would then carve out the painted areas. The motion of the brush created little flairs at the beginning at end of each brush stroke; these flairs are now known as serifs.

However, Romans writing out documents would use Roman cursive. Roman cursive, like all cursive writing forms, is basically a bunch of shortcuts in writing the 'proper' letters.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Roman culture continued to hold considerable sway amongst the barbarians. The same writing styles were preserved, until the Carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne (Charles the Great) in the Frankish Empire (now France) in the 800s. Charlemagne was a great believer in literacy, and despite never learning to read himself, ordered the creation of a single style of handwriting to be used across his empire, to prevent documents from being misinterpreted. The end result was a pairing of these two writing styles into the majuscule and minuscule letters of a unified alphabet. The minuscule letters, being easier to write quickly, were use normally, but the majuscule letters, with their grand and elegant forms, were used for proper nouns and emphasis. Over the succeeding thousand years, different nations would slowly adapt these letter forms and the relationships between them to their needs: the Italians developed the Humanist minuscule, which later became the italic script; the Germanic peoples developed the blackletter scripts; the Irish developed the insular script. This development continues today, with hundreds of typefaces released each year by type designers.

I don't know why we need hundreds of new typefaces every year. You don't have to go too far down that rat hole before you can't see any difference between supercaligoobilicous and adventualicus. Well, I can't. Those are probably fighting words for people who live in that world.


Cutting letters into stone v-CUT lettering carving letters
Realized while I was working on this that printing and fonts are a recurring topic here.