| 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... |