Why Are There UPPERCASE and lowercase Letters?
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- čas přidán 17. 05. 2024
- The word "script" doesn't sound real to me anymore.
Some sources:
Treasury of Alphabets and Lettering by Jan Tschichold
Selected Essays on the History of Letter-Forms in Manuscript and Print by Stanley Morison
www.gilbertredman.com/medieval...
Bischoff, Bernhard. Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
sites.dartmouth.edu/ancientbo...
www.britannica.com/art/callig...
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Music:
The Snow Queen and Midnight Tale by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
Fantasia a 6 for instrumental consort in g minor No. 2 by William Byrd
Amazing how CZcams comes up with suggestions of things that I neither knew I didn't know, nor realised would be so interesting. This being one of them.
Right! I never would have thought to even look for this.
Algorithms are a great thing... they lead us to great videos like this one.
And they also promote 30 second clips of animals that require no skill to make.
The latter still getting so many more views than actual information...
I love it, CZcamsrs for a moment during the transition to today’s state were more often like “hey guys!” Type stuff. The proliferation of the loose video essay format has totally changed the game in a way I wouldn’t have predicted! I have used YT from the start despite being only 11 when it was launched in 2005, but definitely I am happy with the state of today’s content (minus the copyright/content restriction/clickbait issues) where as I abandoned watching “CZcamsrs” for years once things were in the beginning of monetization, “like and subscribe”, etc. folks these days do the same thing but the best can give a “leave a comment about this” request without seeming like they’re saying “I don’t care but let’s get some involvement so comment your favorite color” etc.
People upload their knowledge onto CZcams to share for something of interest... I love absorbing all their knowledge....thanks to all the people sharing their knowledge
@@trill4907 The trouble I find is with recall. I think I've learnt something but it turns out I've merely entertained myself for a while as often I don't recall the important details later.
Another instance of the quote “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
From stone tablets(Block/capital) to papyrus(Rounded/cursive) to printed paper (upper case/lower case), we have shaped our technology, and thereafter, our writing and our thinking has been shaped as well.
The last part is a solid reason to learn another language as you'll need to think in a different way.
👍
Crows use tools and so do monkeys etc. and yet there is no suggestion that they have been transformed. Your quip is mere fancy. Our diet does shape us physically and mentally, while using tools can impact our physical being but to give credit to tools shaping technology and thus our thinking is a leap. Our thinking remains unique and tools like HBOT can shape our thinking abilities by forming new pathway and rebuilding weakened ones. Thinking has always been shaped by experiences, the basis for learning. Tools are inanimate objects that are only incidental to experiences. I repeat, experiences shape our thinking with diet also contributing to this with the various pathways being turned on or off from the chemical reactions. Tools do not shape our thinking, they only facilitate our brains learning experiences.
Yeah. The cultures that write on leaves tend to have very curly characters to not tear the leaf.
@@edwardwalsh4454
Reddit moment
Fun fact, my grandfather did learn Gothic all the way through school, the year after did Denmark change to the new letters. He had to learn to read all over again! :-)
I have some old Danish textbooks printed in Fraktur (Gothic) from before 1920.
@@lohphat Lol, okay, very interesting:-)
I was born in Germany in 1955. I still can read gothic texts. The younger ones certainly can't.
@@heidrich55It's not that different tbh
Wow!
English grammar teacher here. They are normally referred to as proper nouns and common nouns.
In Florida, my teachers all called them improper nouns
Now you have to ask the words which they prefer to be called or identify with.
@@barbietripping If they're called improper nouns in Florida, that means they should be called common nouns. :)
@@barbietripping
>in Florida
There's your problem
Are they Proper Nouns or proper nouns though?
I like this anecdote of how the terms Uppercase and Lowercase came to be. It is one of the remnants of a long gone era that still sticks with us. It's been centuries since those cases were in use, and yet we still call the letters based on how they were positioned on a case
Those cases aren't as bygone as you might think. The first alternative - the Linotype machine - didn't come onto the market until the 1880s, and it was still incredibly common really until the widespread adoption of photo- and computer typesetting around the 70s for movable type to be used for a great deal of publishing.
In Germany we call them “Großbuchstaben” and “Kleinbuchstaben”. Meaning big and small letters. :)
Yes, much history in our language. I'm sure Shakespeare was very happy with Gutenberg.
Sort of like the save file icon
@@HupfderFloh Or "dialing" a phone number.
We need a second video explaining how we got from Carolingian script to Wingdings.
And from Wingdings to Wokedinbats to WokeCovidians...
Wingdings was invented by Microsoft to allow the use of emoji and similar with limited character encoding. Need a smiley? Change font to Windings, and put in a "J", change font back, and there you go. You can still see this happen if you send a mail from a Microsoft client to a non-MS one; there will sometimes be random J's at the end of sentences.
This way, to expand the library of emojis and other symbols, they don't need more codespace. They just need another font, and call it, say, Wingdings 2. Which is a decent solution if you never cross outside the MS boundary.
@@MasterHigure That is not correct. Wingdings existed with metal type. Sometimes people wanted a little decoration in the text and they would take type out of the wingding characters. I remember setting some type with an oil lamp wingding in the early 70s.
LSD
As a Georgian, I am glad to see how correctly you did your research.
ადამიანი - Human.
Hmmmm. This was indeed interesting, but I'd like to see a video on *how* English grammarians decided what our capitalization rules would be.
Cff
Based on Carolingian influence
If you like to read older books, even as recent as Dickens. I want to say he used the Capitol letter for ideas.
Hope, Faith, Virtue, Truth, Liberty, Freedom, etc.
I agree - tell us the story we thought we were getting...
I’d assume it was just how people were naturally using capital letters, to distinguish important things
I never even gave this subject a thought before, but it turned out to be super interesting. I live in Japan and never even processed until now that our English system of writing is so very different to other forms.
Very concise video! I occasionally teach typography at a local community college as part of a graphic design class, and after watching your video, I realize my class lecture on the history of modern letter forms, is filled with major errors. Having worked in print for decades, I knew the origin of the terms upper and lower case, as well as terms such as leading. Yet even though I had some basic knowledge of the humanistic hand, I had wrongly assumed that it was the absolute basis of upper, lower and italicized forms of modern typography. Although I knew the humanists had rejected much of the rigid church dogma of the time, I did not know they were an early Latin renaissance movement who incorrectly identified Carolingian script as original Latin/Roman. More sadly, I didn't know that Latin cursive was actually of Roman origin. I had wrongly assumed it was the creation of early Christian monks and scribes who over the centuries, had developed simpler letter forms to speed up their work which I had mistaken for Carolingian instead of the Uncial that it was.
I did know however that Black Letter was a fanciful dead end road as letter forms go. As beautiful as it was, it's nearly impossible to read in long graphs which makes it totally impractical for anything other than ornamental document titles and eventually the basis for nearly all western European and American newspaper mastheads. Black Letter's continued popularity in German speaking countries I believe had more to do with Gutenberg's early printed Bible's as a source of Germanic pride. Yet even in German culture, it's popularity waned by the late 19th and early 20th century with the advent of Sans Serif typefaces. Sans Serif type became the dominant trend in print and graphic design, especially after the first world war and was embraced by Germany's influential Bauhaus School. It was Hitler who hated modernism. He and the Nazi party renewed the use of Black Letter as a rejection of western modernism and return to a purely manufactured mythology of German heritage.
Today, Black Letter lives primarily as formal looking ornamental. Surviving print newspapers still use it in their mastheads and web banners. It's often associated with holidays, especially Christmas because of its use in greeting cards and holiday signage. Ironically, it was the rap, hip-hop music and street gang cultures that brought back the popularity of Black Letter in album titles, graffiti and tattoos.
That was a bit long to read but it was worth it. Thank you for the information.❤️
I'd have thought heavy metal beat rap to 'gothic' letters
This also kind of explains why there re two forms of the lower case a (and I think a couple other letters) and we both recognize them as lower case a's despite being two essentially different glyphs (you can see them side by side at @4:00, one in the words "half uncial" and one in the word "uncial", looking pretty much exactly to the two forms we have today.)
Another example is the lower case g.
Are they essentially different? They both have a bow on the left meeting an upright on the right of similar height.
Great catch!
Uncial small 'a' (A) is also more legible, to distinguish it from 'o' (O). Which is problematic in many modern fonts.
As a new calligrapher I was trying to find an answer to this specific question and found this so informative. Really enjoyed this and have learned so much. Thank you so much🙏🙏
Hebrew has sort of the opposite: certain letters have a different form if they're the *last* letter in a word (whereas some letters don't change even then, and are correct in either case).
Greek also has some letters that can have different form if placed in the end of the word.
Arabic has this even more extensively, where almost all letters have a different form when they're at the beginning or end of the word or between two letters, basically three forms per letter
Of course, in cursive some letters are formed differently depending on how they flow into the next letter when they are in the body of a word. Are these other word-ending letters following some such rules?
@@nootics would that allow you to write without spaces? That's pretty cool.
Interesting!
Very cool. Your artwork is better with each new video. And I keep learning new things with each topic. Again very cool.
There is a *bunch* of history behind even just single letters of alphabets, and this is an amazing presentation of how they generally evolved into their cases. You should definitely explore some other languages’ variations on the Latin alphabet and even how some other alphabet families (eg Cyrillic) evolved. I’d also love to see one of these on cursive-so many people believe there is only one “correct” cursive in modern times and don’t even realize that different schools of teaching on cursive have risen and fallen over the last few hundred years (it’s part of the reason so many people think their grandparents’ cursive is so much prettier than their own 😉).
I have been typesetting letter press type most of my life. I only knew the story of Upper and Lower case letters from their position in the type case. I am truly enlightened today. As Paul Harvey would say, Now you know the rest of the story.
Right? I am not a typseter, but I enjoy etymology, and I got a big kick out of that one!
And now we have masses of fonts as well. And in some of them some characters, such as l and I or O and 0 are mainly distinguished/recognised by context. And there can a be a modem/modern confusion.
Keep doing this, bro. You're on a great path.
He should speak a little faster tho.
Thank you. I was wondering how all this came to be. Love how you connected it together without losing me in the details.
Thanks CZcams algorithm for suggesting this video and feeding my love of history, etymology and things I didn’t know I needed to know. Thanks for this wonderful video sir! ♥️ Now I’m off to see what other glorious videos you have! Yep had to come back to tell you I’ve subscribed ☺️
Thank you for this, and especially for defining the distinction between majuscule and minuscule.
There is a small mistake in the German sentence at 0:42.
The "der" needs to start with an uppercase letter.
That's because you also start a sentence with an uppercase letter in German.
So the correct sentence would be "Der Hund jagte den Ball."
Is this a proper sentence? Ich mag Bananen, weil sie keine Knochen haben.
Yup, as a German learner I can confirm this. 👍
Germans also *do not* capitalize adjectives, even when they are "proper" adjectives: "amerikanisch" or "englisch" are written lower case.
So it is confusing enough that you don't know if "Tannenwald" or "Töpfer" refer to a Fir Forest or a potter, respectively, or to a person named Tannenwald or Töpfer.
It got even more confusing when I read about "topferische Reformen" and had to figure out that these reforms had nothing to do with potters or pottery, but with Klaus Töpfer, the former German Environmental Minister.
@@blueshark3354 Yes.
Just found this channel. Second video so far and I am a fan. Keep up the work.
Having just finished reading a very detailed book about the origins of alphabets, which mentions the scripts we are (and were) using only very briefly, it's amazing to stumble across this very informative video about them. Thanks for sharing this!
Great video.It clears up a lot of random questions I had in my head regarding typeface and lettering, and why the Germans always seemed to love that clunky typeface. Thank you!
One of the best summaries I've ever heard. Thank you.
This was so well done, so beautifully presented! This is worth sharing! Thank You! 😎
WOW! What a wonderful class. Maybe due to the clear explanation of such an interesting theme, these were the most pleasant and profitable ten minutes of time I spent in the last 8 months. Thanks a lot, pal, and greetings from Brasil.
Brilliant educational and enjoyable ten minutes or so thank you
Great video! Just FYI, in Spanish, the words "mayúscula" and "minúscula" (in English, "majuscule" and "miniscule") do mean "upper case" and "lower case" respectively, uniform height or not. Just a subtle but still different meaning than in English.
In French, there are also majuscules and minuscules. And capital letters, but I don't know the difference between majuscules and capital... If someone knows?
German just calls them "big-" and "small letters" classic German ;P
Minusculus from Latin is the diminutive of the smaller, and in reference, maiusculus is the diminutive of the bigger. There is no meaning of "case" (a container designed to hold or protect something) in that.
Majuscules and minuscules directly comes from French, like the majority of English vocabulary. In French, they litteraly mean "uppercase" and "lowercase", but as often in English, the meaning slightly derived between the French/latin rooted word and the germanic rooted word. Another example would "pork" designating the meat and "swine" designating the animal.
A very well made explanation. I am 67 now and no one could ever explain me this interesting phenomenon before! Thanks a lot!
Thank you for creating such an interesting video. I worked with typesetting and fonts and I learned a lot!
Point of Order: The Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow were both Irish, although written in Latin. In fact Irish was the first written vernacular in Western Europe. Not many people know that!
I thought the book of Kells came from a Scottish monastery after it was destroyed by vikings
I find it fascinating how writing systems evolve largely in part to the tools with which they were written, I wonder how different Chinese would be if they had used quills instead of brushes, or if Romans had used brushes instead of quills
I imagine a quill written Chinese with rounded lines would look more hieroglyphical than the abstract feel all the straight lines nowadays convey.
Chinese characters evolved from a writing system called "oracle bone script" that was carved into (you guessed it) bones & tortoise shells. A lot of the symbol where still recognizable as what they represented, even tho simplified, in an art style that reminds me of cave paintings. When switching to brush writing, all the lines where straightened out (which a quill system wouldn't need to do, especially since turning a bunch of half-circles and triangles into straight lines or boxes originally even increased to number of strokes in many symbols) and then the number of lines decreased over time for practical reasons (further simplification would still happen even with round lines).
Some examples (kind of a shame there isn't Unicode for oracle bone script yet):
So the symbol for turtle looked like this 🐢 but rotated 90° to the right. Turned to brush strokes 龜 and later simplified to 亀 and then 龟
The original symbol for tiger was also still recognizable (so 🐅 but again rotated 90° right), then got reduced to just the head, 1 hindleg+tail 虎
The symbol for person got reduced to just the legs over time 🧍to 人
Going by importance, it seems ridiculous to reduce something to just the legs, but keeping the writing tools in mind, it actually got reduced to just the straight parts. If round lines were possible, maybe the person would be reduced to the head instead and would be written as a smiley.
Fascinating, well-presented. Answers questions I never thought to ask!
Very insightful and interesting. I appreciate you looking throughout history for typology and typography knowledge.
‘Cases’ are reference to moveable type. Literal cases stacked. One upper and one lower. It was the gold rush and the need to move printing presses that facilitated a mixed case for type called the ‘California case’
Wow. I love learning stuff like this ! Thanks.
In addition, Anglo-Saxons used to write the TH in "the" with a letter all its own that looked a lot like "Y." Signs that say "Ye old inn" are really saying "The old inn"!
I've done that professionally when I worked in a print shop with a strong letter press operation.
I've used a compositing stick, sorted type back into the trays after a job and even once practiced the high level skill of "Pieing type", when you drop your work on the floor and have to sort everything out and put it back together before you can continue printing.
Dropping a page into the insides of a press is less fun than it looks.
But why have I never heard the word "Majuscule" before, and we use minuscule all the time?? Mind blown! lol
Not bashing anyone, but this is common (er?) knowledge in Spanish since we call them MAYÚSCULAS and minúsculas :)
because insulting people and demonstrating your intelligent superiority is fun and great, while remembering complicated obscure words is not. Miniscule lived up this much long bc it is widely used in conflicts and chats to emphasize someone's inferiority
In french, we use both all the times. It is very common and frequently used.
@@pedrotaq Same in Portuguese
MAYUSCULAS, minusculas, but what do we know we are just a bunch savages running around in g strings throwing lances and eating raw rabbits. The North Americans even call the Japanese "Westerners" - so dumb dumb dumb
This is extremely well done - thank you!
Excellent work. Thanks for putting this on here.
Fun Fact: German Fraktur (Blackletter) was also used into the 20th century and ultimately abolished by Goebbels in 1941.
The order to replace both German "Fraktur" (print) and "Kanzleischrift" (handwriting) are from Hitler personnaly. The reason is shrouded in mystery, but it is fairly easy to cast some light onto that. 1: All German schoolchildren had to learn eight alphabets, "Latein" and "Deutsch" and each of them in capital and small letters and that for handwriting and for printed letters: 2 x 2 x 2 =8. Because of the war everything was short and fell shorter: ink, pens, paper, teachers, schoolhours. Getting rid off one script was a logic consequence. Each printing office and newspaper had tons and tons of precious metals like lead, copper, zinc, brass, steel for the four scripts used in printing in an abundance of various sizes (still measured in typographical points as we all know, ask your computer). Metal had fallen scarce in war-time Germany. Half of the metal could be molten down for bullets and shell cases if the types had to be handed in. Finally: the discussion if it was still wise to be proud of ones own script that nobody else on this globe used anymore (except for the Swiss) had been going on for some time in Germany. Despite the incredible backward thinking of the nazis that debate had not been stopped after they had risen to power. It was pure utilitarism that the "Deutsche Schrift" was abandoned in the long run. Hitler's order about it, though, was a full broadside against possible critics. He simply lied that "the Jews" had taken control of all publishing and printing firms right from Gutenberg's days on and had seen to it that a corrupted form of medieval letter should be used. That was obviously nonsense, it was such idiotic that nobody was expected to believe that crap, but as "the Jews" got the blame ( who else?) everybody knew that it would be unwise to ask any questions. It is sheer irony that today's neo-nazis happily use "Fraktur for their propaganda.
@@christiankastorf1427 Fascinating, Christian, thank you! (danke 😉)
It seems like that the "party" didn't only burn books but got rid of a lot of the means to print them as well.
@@christiankastorf1427 Why do you say it was "obvious nonsense"? Unless it is an obvious statistical anomaly that two percenters of whatever religious group are 80% of media ownership.. governor boards and investors of the sector.
@@CHIL2903 Hitler had a lot of newspapers and publishers expropriated to his own benefit. He became a billionaire by that. All newly-weds got a copy of "Mein Kampf" that the townhalls where the legal ceremony took place had to buy in large numbers.
@@absolutium before I try any harder to understand what you wrote, can you just tell us if you’re an anti-Semite or not
It's interesting that Blackletter was incorrectly called "gothic", which is essentially a generalist insult in renaissance Italy to mean barbarian and unrefined (from the Norwegian / Scandinavian tribe of warriors that were perceived to be responsible for destroying civilization and progress). It's "gothic" misnomer refers to it being outside the norm of the time, and therefore 'unrefined' and deserving of Roman acknowledgement. Essentially; if it wasn't classic Roman, it was called gothic to mean "may as well be Viking for all the class and decorum it has".
I love this side note.
Historience don't know where the gothic tribes originated from more than they where of germanic origin. Some wants to place them in scandinavia mostly under the national romantic era of the 19th-century.
I had no idea this was so complicated -- and interesting. Thanks for the post, thoroughly enjoyed it.
The best explanation I have ever seen! Thank you!
My grandparents, great aunts etc, all born 1880s/90s, all reasonably well educated or very well educated still capitalised some common nouns when writing letters. In the case of a couple of great aunts who lived almost to a hundred they were still doing it well into the 1990s.
1:15 Objection! They didn't have a U either. They had V
Thank you for making this video. It was very informative.
Thank you. That was an Interesting video. I especially like the part near the End about Emphasizing important words.
Love it when I leave off ignorance on something and gain knowledge. Some of this I knew some was completely new such as the Upper/Lower classes from where the printing press letters were stored. Cool beans.
The "Dark Ages" seems to be moving around.
As a child, I learned the Dark Ages of going
from the fall of Rome, to about 1000, or the Battle of Hastings.
The reason it was called that was the small amount of writings from that period.
The Middle Ages were there own SEPARATE period.
They were in the middle (hence the name)
between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance.
The demarcation of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
was also problematic.
Was it 1453 - the fall of Constantinople.
Was it 1350's - the Black Death
Was it the fall of Andalusia and the completion of the Reconquista??
Thins is -- Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and Renaissance were separate
and distinct, but with fuzzy edges.
That's what I learned in grade school, anyway.
I feel like they just called the entire post-Roman pre-Renaissance period “the dark ages” back when I was a kid in school (I’m about 20 now for reference). But then again, American schools and especially their history curriculums are a big joke.
However, as a now historical enthusiast I do like the division that you seemed to learn in school of that period into the earlier “dark ages” and later “middle ages.” Those two periods, in my opinion, are so distinct from each other in so many ways that it warrants the need to divide them. And although many modern historians are denouncing the use of “dark ages” nowadays, I believe it’s still a pretty appropriate term for the about 500-1000AD era.
As for when the Middle Ages end and the renaissance began, I’ve always liked the 1453 date since two very significant European events happened that year, the fall of Constantinople and the end of the hundred years war. Both events shook both halves of Europe and the continent was never the same afterwards. Another thing to consider however, is that the Italians experienced the renaissance during about the 1300s while, say, England, didn’t get one until after the wars of the roses in the late 1400s.
@@TAKE_BACK_BRITAIN Thank you.
I do not understand the reluctance to use the term "Dark Ages". I think some people think of it as a pejorative.
It was merely the idea that we know little about it, because of the paucity of written records.
We have learned a lot from archeology, but that is not the same as written records.
What is more distressing is that seemingly learned people use the terms "Dark Ages" and "Middle Ages" interchangeably, as if they were the same.
They are not, and never were the same.
@@craigkdillon That depends on where you're from though. And what you're being taught...
Also when have people poorly versed in history not said something "concerning"? haha
@Brad Bowers The Dark Ages was NOT a pejorative. It was not an insult. Nor was the term Middle Ages.
It was later when ignorant people applied such notions.
And there really was a Dark Ages.. The period from about 500 AD to about 1000 is very poorly recorded.
Even leaders we know about, like Canute, and Ragnar have very little on them. Many rulers in the 6th, 7th and 8th Centuries we know little about.
The Frankish kings we know some, but even there, not too much.
It depends on the country: in Italy the term dark ages isn't really used since there's not really a particular scarcity of documents, instead the middle ages are divided into high(476-1000) and low(1000-1492) the ending date is set with the landing of Columbus in America since it marked the beginning of the end of italian states' hegemony on sea commerce due to its shift from the Mediterranean to the ocean. So yeah, no battle of Hastings.
Funnily enough, most medievalists around the world don't even like the term middle ages since it encompasses a period so long and full of important events that many of its supposed parts don't have much in common
I learned SO MUCH. Thank you!
Very informative. Especially about the upper case and lower, something I never thought about.
The most important thing I learnt here is that MAJUSCULE is a word and that it needs to be used for much more than just letters.
I'll let my girlfriend know.
MAGUSCOOL
I didn't know that English had an equivalent word for this. In Portuguese we say "maiúsculo" for upper case
Good video. Thanks to the internet and social media, it looks like English writing is changing again. While traditional printed documents may use the uppercase/lowercase rules, texts and Messenger tend to have different rules or no rules. Examples are abbreviations for words/phrases normally not abbreviated ("btw, imho, fwiw"), the addition of memes and emoji's, and ALL CAPS for emphasis, shouting, and trolling. Hundreds of years from now, these new "rules" will be the norm, even in professional and formal communication.
Thank you so much for uploading this video. It is helping me get through the pandemic!
Thx for your work !
I read a book "the missing ink" covered this amd more. It's a very interesting topic
In Italian we still have cursive, which is another style of writing where essentially you should be able to write any word without ever having to lift the pen off the paper, ie only lift the pen when separating words from each other.
It also has its upper case and lower case btw
english and russian and many other languages still also have cursive. Russian cursive is an illegible joke and english cursive is dying out presently
Also still used in Finland. After kids start learning it school, basically everything that is written is required to written in cursive in literature classes/mother tongue classes. It's used so much that most start writing everything in cursive even if there's no real need to.
@@spugelo359 Well, sort of. Back when I went to school in the 1980s, this was true. I was taught the cursive model brought about in the 1950s, the same as my parents. (My grandparents had been taught the preceding system from the 1800s, I think.) But since then, there has been a simplification in the cursive used, almost to the point that it is just mildly connected lowercase letters. There was yet another reform recently, and by this time, I can no longer really tell what the current model is. My 13-year-old learned writing in the way they used to teach it after my schooldays but younger children learn it differently still. (One major difference is in whether there is a horizontal tick in the middle of the vertical part of the number 7. It was supposedly introduced during the last war to ensure firing coordinates were spelled out accurately. It was still in place when I went to school, was removed by the time my child went to school, and now it is back.) Technically speaking, I don’t think it is cursive anymore. But I gather at some schools pupils have been envious of previous generations and have persuaded their teachers to spend a few hours to teach them proper cursive handwriting.
@@janihyvarinen73I just googled cursive and what we were taught in 2000s was nearly identical. Some obvious differences would be between some lower cases like f, r and s... and x and z we do not really use anyway. Nearly all of the upper cases were different though... but those are used far less often than lower cases.
I assume that is why everyone that uses cursive has it. What you described for Italian was told to me during my childhood for English.
Neat analysis video! Thanks for uploading!
Super interesting and well put together. Thanks!
What you call "Gothic" I call "Schwabach" or "Schwabacher". It took some time to learn, but it is not that hard if you understand the language (German in my case). It helped a lot when researching old newspapers (ca. 100 years old) when trying to get more information on a specific topic. Unfortunately, I do not speak Hungarian, so I was limited to German sources.
I never consciously learned them but I can still read them, but slow. But I guess you need a lot of practise to be able to read them at a reasonable speed.
The hard part is reading the uppercase letters. In my opinion. Because a lot of them are so complicated that the basic form completely vanishes. Lower case is rather easy.
I sometimes read church records from balkan 19th +/- century.
The hard part is understanding church latin or Hungarian.
In French, they're still called miniscule and majiscule.
minUscule and majUscule
@@21stcenturyozman20 bah, c'est vrai !
This is also true for Spanish and Italian.
Also in Portuguese.
German: "Großbuchstaben" and "Kleinbuchstaben". Why letters are called "Buchstabe(n)" in German is another mystery. "Stab" means stick and "Buch" can mean book but could also stand for "Buche", the beech tree.
This is an excellent channel, with excellent videos.
Thank you for not turning this simple question into a 2 hour video essay
Of course, I had a copy of the "Manual of Style" which gave such rules. The Palmer Method then converted those rules to script handwriting.
japanese has some form of lower case. Btw. Which font class is your favourite? Mine is the venecian renaissance antiqua
I disagree. The similarities between uppercase and lowercase, and ひらがな and かたかな, are very superficial. They're not used at all the same way.
@@StrategicGamesEtc I didn't say that they had lower case like we do. They do have smaller versions of their characters that are especially made to form differently sounding syllables.
@@atdynax Hiragana characters and their katakana counterparts are pronounced exactly the same. か and カ sound the same. The only difference is that katakana is used for loan words (and onomatopoeia). And even that's not a hard rule. Writers can deviate from the "normal" use for many reasons, including stylistic choice.
@@atdynax I still don't think that's a great analogy, given the case doesn't change pronunciation (phonemically) in English.
@@StrategicGamesEtc It's not about what they do but that they are smaller.
Glad for this explanation!
This is very informative.
It's interesting to see that handwriting was the origin of lowercase letters (which, in turn got their own cursive/handwriting versions. Hebrew also has what is called the block/square version (which most people would recognize) and a written script. It's not 'cursive' per se in that the letters don't usually connect to the following letters so you don't have to lift your pen. But there's no concept of capital and lowercase. Still, and maybe because I carry it over from growing up in the US, when I write Hebrew down on a daily basis (I live in Israel), I will mix and match the square letters with the handwriting versions.
Shalom! I only learned the block script and used to write blessings... til i made Aliyah. I did my placement test in the block script and the teacher threw my test and very not nicely said, "What is this?!?" I told her it was my test as i got it off the floor. She said, "Do you know these letters?" pointing to the script. I told her that i had seen them, but didn't know them. She wrote A++ on my form and said, "Next!"... The A++ was the ulpan class to which i was assigned...
I wonder what the story is behind final letters in Hebrew.
Most of this I was already aware of, one thing that I have learnt from this is the cases where the letters were kept were upper and lower case. Thanks for the info.
How do you not have more subs? The quality is amazing!
Excellent overview.
I find it interesting that, in spite of all our formal education in English grammar and punctuation, many people are reverting to the use of capitalization for emphasis, including capitalizing letters in the middle of words. I can't think of any examples right now, but do remember seeing this on Reddit and similar sites.
> I cAn'T tHinK oF anY eXaMpLes
OMG you and me both, bro. You and me both.
Actually (and for Real), I guess if I write "capitaLizing" y'all know which syllable is stressed-in case you didn't know alReady, which I assume you do.
I Have Seen People Capitalizing The First Letter In Every Word For Emphasis As Well.
@@staticradio724 No Way!
if you want to differentiate between THIS apple and ANY apple.
I was thinking much the same. But then I wondered if it ever fully went away. Sure it wasn’t part of formal grammar, but internet “speech” writing isn’t formal grammar, but neither are notes in the margins, shopping lists, and countless other ad hoc scribbles.
There's another aspect to this which doesn't seem to be specifically mentioned - the "lower case" forms evolved from writing capitals faster and faster, as demand increased for copies of books. It's possible to trace the way each letter morphs from cap to small. Also Italic developed first in italy when the scribes started slanting their script to increase speed.
In Italian, italic is called ‘corsivo’.I’m not an expert on Italian etymology, but it appears to share a root with the word ‘corsa’, which translates as race or rush. Which makes sense!
@@lidbassYes, indeed! The Italian wird derives from Latin currere - to run.
@@lidbassso a currier script
Fantastic video. Thank you!!
Came away knowing more. Much kudos!
“Latin had no case system”! Ha, if only....
amogus in latin would be AMOCVS
In the case of Latin, (pardon the pun) their nouns had many cases. Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental and locative cases.
@@draugami Unless I am mistaken, you are referring to the words themselves, and not the characters used to write them.
@@laurendoe168 Yea, that the joke OP wanted to make. lol
Is this what my fellow redditors would call an r/woosh moment?
@@MrFreakHeavy :D Oh. I was wondering if maybe it was a confusion between "case" and "caste." Rome definitely had a caste system. :D
While Japanese doesn't have upper and lower cases it does have hiragana and katakana - the use of katakana sometimes fulfills the role of emphasis or delineation which upper case letters sometimes serve in English.
Japanese HAS fullwidth and halfwidth katakana hiragana and even kanji. It can be viewed as "cases".
@@andreykuzmenko3465 Eh, I dont think cases is a good word
* Japan has Romanji which fulfills this as it's just English as in upper and lower case, however
* Kanji is completely different, it's seen as foriegn and old and Japan has tried lots of times to get rid of it with varying degrees of success
* Hiragana and katakan come the closest to being 2 scripts seen as one with rules on how to use each one but it really doesn't feel like English, I feel their not seen as cases but as two different scripts
* Half-width isn't much of a thing anymore, it wasn't anything formally part of the language, it provided a way to put more characters on the screen for older devices but it's still used sometimes.
@@andreykuzmenko3465 While it's true that certain kana are used in half height form, the role of this quirk of hiragana and katakana is very different from the role that cases play in the english language.
Additionally only a limited small number of kana can be used as half height characters.
@@junehanabi1756 Ok to start it's "Rōmaji" (ローマ字) not "romanji" and fulfills what? I have never seen a Japanese person use rōmaji while talking to another Japanese person.
Kanji is literally 40% of all characters Japan (as far as I know) never tried to get rid of Kanji and even if they did nowadays Kanji is a very important part of their culture which is not going away any time soon I feel like you should've explained that in your comment.
You are correct on the fact Katakana and Hiragana are seen as 2 different scripts however Katakana doesn't really have rules for example let's take the word "Tanuki" (A very cute racoon dog thing) can be written as 狸 or タヌキ same thing for ダメ which can also be written as だめ I can keep going.
@@TonkarzOfSolSystem Actually I don't know about Hiragana (I don't think half width Hiragana exists) but every ｶﾀｶﾅ I tried can be half width.
Great, intetesting video. Thank you!
love the channel and content, commenting for the Algo
Normie
REALLY ENJOYED LEARNING THIS INFORMATION.
Great video this is an area I know a ton of trivia about and I still learned a couple super cool things! :)
That's a really interesting answer to a question I would never have asked until saw the title of your video 👌
Es la historia de la literatura universal es dé gran importancia para nosotros y Las futuras generaciones qué están nacimiendo en este siglo presente.🌎🌍🌏
Without capital letters, WE CANT SHOUT OVER TEXT
Thank you, really cool and exciting video! It's bookmarked for watching it with my daughter, when she's older.
Great video, didn’t find ur channel till now, but you have my sub
Johannes Gutenberg created the first printing press... in Europe. There were printing presses long before that in Asia.
Other than that, loved the video.
My understanding is that Gutenberg specifically invented the movable-type printing press ... He did not invent even the first press -- or even the first European one.
@@halfsourlizard9319 The Chinese were movable long before Gutenberg. The fixed ones came about centuries before for printing Buddhist sutras.
@@lorenam8028 Internetted a bit harder; you appear to be correct :}
In some ways, katakana can be considered the "upper case" of hiragana, although obviously the uses are not quite the same. But it's definitely a second script that covers the exact same sounds that has a different usage pattern, where some of the forms are quite obviously related to each other.
I remember wondering about this just the other day. Thanks youtube recommendations, you did this one good haha.
Lovely video.
Thanks for the lesson! I learned so much!
This was an excellent and informative video. But isn’t the convention to pronounce the “g” in “Carolingian” as it is pronounced in “sing?”
George Appel In what country?
"Rules that we basically follow today"
...Except on the internet.
fascinating and enjoyable thank you.
This channel needs far more subscribers.
18:29 _In the 15th century Johannes Gutenberg created the first printing press._
*cough* China had printing presses in the 800s CE and moveable type presses in the 1000s CE.
Korea also had moveable type presses by at least the 1300s CE.
Of course, the idea of printing isn't new. Wood burning letters had been around for centuries, and wax seals and insignias could be thought of as a variation on printing.
It would be more accurate to say Gutenberg popularized the printing press.
The invention was printing with movable letters, not printing itself. The effect was that printing went from an obscure craft for special effects to being a way to mass-produce books.
Point of order: Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press, not the printing press per se.
Without movable type, it's a stamp, not a printing press.
The Chinese invented printing over a thousand years before Gutenberg.
I know my children are going to ask me this question someday. This video will definitely help me. Once they start learning my native language which is so well structured, I need to have really good explanations of all such oddities found in English.
I enjoy all general knowledge educative information thank you.
Am I right that the earliest greek manuscripts were all in upper case greek letters and no spaces in between the words ? Later greek is the lower case writing.
No they used ink mixed with egyptian culture