Do other languages have uppercase and lowercase?

The distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters doesn’t exist in all languages, though. Certain Eastern and Asian writing systems, including certain Indian, Chinese, and Japanese alphabets, do not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters.

Why do some languages have capital letters?

Capital letters add a layer of information to the writing, signifying sentence starts, names, titles, and proper nouns. Most of the letters used in English derive from the Roman alphabet, which was entirely upper case.

Why do uppercase and lowercase letters exist?

When the printing press came along in the 1400s, type designers based their lowercase letters on Carolingian minuscule. The wooden cases where letters were stored for printing had different compartments by type. Lowercase and uppercase letters were stored in separate type cases, hence the names.

Does capitalization exist in other languages?

Many scripts do not have capital letters e.g. Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Japanese, Indic languages (Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi, etc.), Thai, etc. Greek, Latin, Cyrillic and Armenian alphabets have capital letters, as do the languages derived from them (like English, German, Spanish, French, etc.)

Are capital letters used in Arabic?

Arabic is written from right to left – the opposite of English. Arabic script is always joined or cursive, ie there is no equivalent of the English text you are now reading, where all the letters have separate forms with spaces between them. There are no capital letters.

Does Arabic have upper and lowercase?

Arabic words and sentences are written and read from right to left and books and papers from back to front. However, Arabic numbers are read and written from left to right. There is no upper or lower case and there are multiple forms to write a single letter.

Does Hebrew have upper and lowercase letters?

The Hebrew alphabet supports a limited character set of 27 symbols. Five letters have a final form that gets used when the character appears at the end of a word (“sofit”). All the letters are uppercase — THERE ARE NO LOWERCASE LETTERS IN HEBREW!

Is Greek read right to left?

Most of the modern languages in Europe, North America, South America, India and Southeast Asia are written from left to right. These languages feature Latin, Modern Greek, Cyrillic, Indic and Southeast Asian alphabet and are therefore written from left to right.

Why are lowercase and uppercase letters called lowercase letters?

Lowercase and uppercase letters were stored in separate type cases, hence the names. Usually the letters used more frequently (the lowercase) were kept closer (or lower) on a compositor’s (“person who sets the type or text for printing”) desk. We started using these terms in the 1700s.

What is the origin of the uppercase distinction?

However, what is not so clear is the origin of the uppercase distinction that has become common practice, especially in regards to Modern English. To unmask the origin of the capital letter, we need to refer to a script derived from the Old Roman cursive called uncial. The word is derived from the Latin uncialis meaning “of an inch, of an ounce.”

What came first majuscule or uppercase letters?

Historians believe that majuscule or uppercase letters came first. The first alphabets were written entirely in large majuscule letters, evenly spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds. Over time, however, it was only natural that smaller versions of each letter would develop.

What is an example of a case letter?

When it comes to letters, case refers to whether letters are written in larger uppercase form, which is also often known as majuscule or capital letters, or smaller lowercase form, which is also known as miniscule or small letters. For example, the first three letters of the alphabet in uppercase form are A, B, and C.