843: Cases: Upper and Lower Mar 30, 2017

Writing with just plain-and-simple words on a page is not too complicated and tends to be fairly straight-forward and logical. Punctuation, diacritics and fonts however are new and merely conventional. Most Roman texts, for example, had no punctuation, no lower-case, no macrons like those seen today, and spacing was not common for many centuries in that long literary history. All of those features now used in English writing were just to make things visually simpler, but the standards we have now were not always those we currently use. As mentioned, there was no lower case; these variations only came about over many centuries when scribes would use different tricks to fit more words on a page. With letters hence becoming smaller, writers needed ways to make things stick out. Elaborate rubrics for the first letters of chapters or pages were common, but so was just adding capital letters, or majuscule to important words. This started as anything: some people capitalized all nouns (as is still the case with German), some only capitalized names of people and places, and some started capitalizing the first letter of every sentence. Today, each writing-system has its own standards, but this changes language-to-language, country-to country, and especially alphabet-to-alphabet.

For more of these conventions, see this on apostrophes