History of Capital and Lowercase

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mi Vong.

Where are you calling from, Mi?

I’m calling from Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

I’m a first-born generation Vietnamese American, and I didn’t speak English until I was six. And I remember going through kindergarten, wondering, because back then they didn’t have ESL, you know, English as a second language to teach us. And I remember the teacher was trying to teach us the alphabet and everything, and the teacher told me to go up there and try to spell a word and tell me to spell apple. And it was the first letter, so the A had to be capitalized. But instead of me making the A tall, I made the smaller A just taller instead of making the capital A. And she said I was wrong, but then I asked her, I was like, well, Y is like a small C, like a big C, you know, a small O is a big O. You know, P is a big P and V and W. Other letters like A, Q, you know, and G and so on and so forth are like different, you know, different letter sizes, different letter shapes.

Right.

Oh, what an interesting question.

Yeah, and she couldn’t answer it. And then she said, she told me, it just is. Because I said so.

Exactly. So I was like, okay, to me, like, white’s not white. It’s purple because I said so.

Oh, okay. We can help you with this. It’s complicated, but I think I can give you a short answer here that will allow you to research this a little more, okay?

Okay, awesome.

So the first thing you’ve got to understand that the alphabet as we know it came to us, it’s not even secondhand. It’s like a sixthhand alphabet. It has literally been passed from generation to generation so often that it’s become corrupted. So keep that corruption in mind. Originally, our alphabet, most of it came from the Phoenicians. And then it was borrowed by the Greeks who took the sounds of the letters and applied them to their own language, even though they didn’t share very much vocabulary at all. And then the Greek letters were borrowed by the Etruscans, which were in turn borrowed by the Roman peoples and the Italians. So this is messy. And every single time that happened, the culture made a change. Well, we don’t have that sound, but we like that letter. We’re going to use it for some other purpose. And you’ve also got to remember that in there somewhere, there were only capital letters. Many languages did not have lowercase letters. So in the language trade, we’d call those majuscules are the big letters, and minuscules are the lowercase letters. And so once they needed those lowercase letters, usually for handwriting, scribes needed them, it’s faster to write certain kinds of letters. Then they borrowed again from the same alphabet sets, only this time they wrote them a little differently. And then the lowercase letters started transforming over the centuries or the millennia in their own way and sometimes separately from the capital letters. That’s the short, short, short version.

Do you want a really good book that will give you more?

Wow, that’s the short version. A really great book that is totally readable by anyone is the book Letter Perfect, and the author is David Sachs, S-A-C-K-S. And he’s really, really passionate about this topic, and the book is very, very readable.

Okay, that’s cool.

So you were telling me, you know, all of these cultures that put all of these letters together.

Yeah.

So are we literally going over thousands of years, obviously thousands of years here, or like across, you know, time here, or what’s the time range here?

At least as early as 700 B.C., though it probably dates back even further. Probably 900 or even 1,000 years B.C.

Wow.

So three millennia.

Me, we appreciate your calling.

Okay, thanks.

Take care now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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