Re: coding conventions

In article <ZMP3f.13403$y_1.12719@edtnps89>,
Oliver Wong <owong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> I am not a linguist, but I've never heard of a "middle case". I think
>case is primarily a Latin invention, and languages not derived from Latin do
>not have any such concept. My primary language is English, but even I must
>admit that it certainly seems "wasteful" or "useless" to have two versions
>of every character. The concept of casing has almost zero semantic
>information; the proof being that when we speak English (as opposed to write
>it), the case information is lost completely, and yet no semantic
>information is lost.

It does serve a purpose as a marker for the start of sentences and a
few other elements that are - presumably - important to the reader.

I agree, though, that it seems rather wasteful to introduce a whole
new set of symbols for this when you could just as well adopt some
general solution for this, using a bar across the top of the letter or
whatever.

It would almost surprise me, however, if some overly enterprising
medieval artist didn't invent separate symbols for some other
important-seeming reason. A separate set of symbols to use for the
names of saints and popes perhaps :-)

Of course, there used to be quite different fonts in wide use up
through the ages, these might perhaps been seen as separate cases if
you had a writing tradition where very different-seeming fonts would
be used for different things in the same text. In a modern context, if
you always use Times New Roman for the main text, Arial for cautionary
notes and Courier for code snippets, then you're moving in that
general direction. Exchange each of those fonts with ones that don't
look anything like one another, and you're wholly there.

For all I know, this may be how the modern uppercase/lowercase system
came about in the first place.

Cheers
Bent D
--
Bent Dalager - bcd@xxxxxxx - http://www.pvv.org/~bcd
powered by emacs
.

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