Most of the world's languages use case, the difference between uppercase (large) and lowercase (small) letters. The former are written at the beginning of sentences, names and titles, and are used much less frequently than the latter. As a rule, each lowercase character corresponds to an uppercase (capital) one, and two parallel sets of letters with the same names are used simultaneously in the letter.
History of occurrence
The concept of "upper" (capital) and "lower" (lowercase) cases arose in the 19th century with the advent of typewriters. In them, for writing small letters, it was necessary to move the printing bar to the lower position, and for large letters - to the top. Accordingly, the former were called minuscule, and the latter, majuscule. The register also began to be used in technical documentation, mainly in diagrams and drawings. Such a classification of characters still exists, and in descriptive geometry there are clear rules when to write capital letters, and when to write lowercase.
Today, all computer technology uses a register - two "parallel" sets of characters of large and small sizes. To switch modes on a computer, just press the Caps Lock key, or type characters while holding down the Shift key. If all small alphabetic characters correspond to large ones ("w" - "W", "a" - "A"), then for numbers and additional keys Shift adds new values.
So, holding down the Shift key turns the number 7 into a question mark "?" or into the ampersand "&", and the mathematical sign "+" becomes "=". It is thanks to the register that modern keyboards have such compact dimensions, because without its use the number of keys would have to be increased by more than 2 times. The register is also used on all devices with touch input: tablets, smartphones, DVRs, etc.
Casing Features
There is a so-called "unicameral" script that uses only lowercase (small) letters, but in the vast majority of alphabets, both lowercase and uppercase are used simultaneously. The difference between them lies not only in the fact that the former are small in size, and the latter are large. So, the main feature of the upper case is the same height of characters, with rare exceptions (capital letter "Q"). And for lowercase characters, this is a standard feature, and most of them have lower or upper ledges. For example, let's take the letters "y", "p" and "g" to the first ones, and "b", "f" and "t" to the second ones.
Deprecated fonts sometimes used in typing also apply case to digits. For example, 9, 7, and 5 are lower case, while 6 and 8 are upper case. Accordingly, the former may have descending elements, while the latter may have ascending elements that move characters outside the bounds of the text field.
Interesting facts
There are many rules and restrictions on the use of case, which vary from language to language and from field to field. For example, ancient Greek symbols are widely used in mathematics and physics, and old Latin is used in medicine. These non-standard letters are written in the same row as the usual letters of the alphabet, and require adjustment for case: upper and lower. The situation with Asian (and not only) world languages is much more complicated:
- Japanese can "switch" between katakana and hiragana, and words that should start with a capital letter are written in all lowercase (and vice versa). In addition, individual kana characters change case when combined with previous yon characters and following sokuon characters.
- In Korean, some letters change case depending on their position in the word.
- In Arabic, the case changes depending on whether the letter is associated with neighboring characters 1 time, 2 times, or not even once (for example, in prepositions and interjections).
- In the Hebrew alphabet, 5 characters change case if they end in a word.
- In the Georgian language, when writing literary texts, the outdated asomtavruli alphabet is often used, in which the register differs from the official Georgian language.
All these inconsistencies created, and continue to create, great difficulties when transferring handwritten texts to digital form. Moreover, many national writing features do not have a clear classification of registers, and words are considered correctly written in several variations at once. Fortunately, modern digital algorithms take into account all these nuances, and allow you to automatically track and convert registers in text information.
