[lordnacho]

What exactly is the reason people started to have upper and lower case letters? I found a few articles about this appearing in the middle ages, but there doesn't seem to be a reason that makes sense. Seems to add nothing to the language, wtf is the point of the first letter being a capital anyway, and rules about various words that have to have caps?

[wanderingstan]

Like many things that evolved slowly over time, there isn’t a single clear reason for the upper/lower case distinction.

The distinction began as a mixing of different writing styles (called “hands” in calligraphy), something similar to how we today will mix fonts in a document.

“Lower case” was the newer, more common font. (What wed today call uncial or Carolingian)

“Upper case” was a font based on older, Roman-era designs. This is why Roman monuments like the Trajan column appear to us as being in all capitals.

Using the older “font” at the beginning of sentences seems to have begun as stylistic choice, but perhaps with some purpose as a reading aid to identify sentence starts, somewhat in the same way we’ll use different fonts for headings. Note that punctuation (periods, question marks, commas, etc) was also evolving at around the same time and didn’t exist in Roman times.

Bold and italic also evolved from the mixing of different “fonts” within one text.

Wish I could find a better source, but this is what I’ve learned as a calligrapher over the years.

Some more info here: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/history-of-capital-letter...

Edit: the codification of upper/lower case took place in the Italian classical revival during the Renaissance. See: https://www.primidi.com/history_of_western_typography/classi...

[tgv]

As the other comment says: readability. ALGOL-68 (infamously) allows spaces in identifiers, which makes the code look a bit more natural. C and it's descendants don't, so a logical recourse is using underscores, or --if that's too much typing-- switching capitalization. Pascal was at the forefront of this convention (weirdly enough because the language is case insensitive, I think).

Other conventions were added: e.g., a capital for a type name, m as a prefix for class members, and of course a leading _ as an indication of not being public (which comes from the unix linker/, IIRC).

Anyway, I think the answer to OP's question is a negative number.

[myrion]

Legibility. It is a significant improvement, and it still bothers me that English underuses it, even after years of it being my primary reading language.

[shultays]

    English underuses it

You mean it underuses capitalization? What are the examples in other languages that uses for other purposes?

[doctor_eval]

I believe that in German all Nouns are Capitalised, not just Proper Nouns.

Please correct Me if I’m wrong.

(Except for my Capitalisation, which is all over the place because I’m trying to illustrate to English readers why I find German really hard to read)

[giomasce]

Notice that "Capitalised" and "Proper" are adjectives and "Me" is a pronoun, so they're not capitalised in German.

[wanderingstan]

Yes, that is correct.

It’s just a convention. Early English writing sometimes also capitalized all nouns.

I imagine the capitalization of Latin alphabets must seem crazy to someone whose native language doesn’t have them.