But as the centuries progressed, scribes started mixing in smaller, non-majuscule letters. Uncial started as a majuscule script not too different from Rustic, and thus it was entirely majuscule. By the third century CE, a popular writing style for scribes was uncial, which takes its name from a story in the Bible. Older writing systems tended to have straight lines and sharp edges because if you’re writing in stone, it’s pretty hard to carve consistent curves.Īs writing shifted more toward parchment, the style changed with it. These early forms of writing were limited by the material that was being written on. During the early centuries of writing with the Latin alphabet, scribes would use Trajan and, later, Rustic, which were essentially ancient fonts. Majuscule is a type of writing that today we would call capital letters, and it was the dominant form of writing in the Greek and Roman empires. This isn’t because Romans wanted to yell all the time it’s because the earliest writing was entirely in majuscule. Julius Caesar, for example, would be written as IVLIVS CAESAR (U was written as V, and J was written as I). If you think back to reading about old Greek and Latin writing, you might remember that it looks like it’s written in all caps. To look at where capital letters come from, you have to go way back to when there was no upper or lower case at all. And when you look beyond English and other European languages, you might not even find capital letters at all.
But if you think about it, they’re not exactly “necessary.” As it turns out, they come from an old style quirk that has managed to survive thousands of years to become the capital letters we know today. But there is at least one feature of written language that has seemingly nothing to do with spoken language: capital letters.Ĭapital letters might seem like an integral part of the language. The Latin alphabet, for example, attempted to capture human speech sounds with its symbols (though we should note not every writing system works the same way). Most important is that speech came first, and writing tried to copy speech to the best of its ability.
They are both crucial parts of human communication, but there are important differences between them. It’s easy to think about the written and spoken word as being the same thing.
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