Minuscule

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Minuscule

Lower case (also lower-case or lowercase), minuscule, or small letters are the smaller form of letter

Letter (alphabet)

A letter is an element in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Each letter in the written language is usually associated with one phoneme in the spoken form of the language....
s, as opposed to upper case or capital letters, as used in European alphabets (Greek

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
, Latin

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
, Cyrillic

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic languages national languages as well as non-Slavic . It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past....
, and Armenian

Armenian alphabet

The Armenian alphabet is an alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. Up to the 19th century, Classical Armenian had been the literary language; since then, the Armenian alphabet has been used to write the two modern dialects of Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian....
). For example, the letter "a" is lower case while the letter "A" is upper case.

Originally alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standardized set of letter basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a phoneme, a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past....
s were written entirely in capital letters, spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds.

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Encyclopedia

Lower case (also lower-case or lowercase), minuscule, or small letters are the smaller form of letter

Letter (alphabet)

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
, Latin

Latin alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

Armenian alphabet

Alphabet

Pen

File:03-BICcristal2008-03-26.jpgA pen is a writing instrument used to apply ink to a surface, usually paper. There are several different types, including ballpoint pen, rollerball pen, fountain pen, felt-tip....
, these tended to turn into rounder and much simpler forms, like uncial

Uncial

Uncial is a majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Byzantine Empire scribes. Uncial letters are written in either Greek, Latin, or Gothic....
s. It is from these that the first minuscule hands developed, the half-uncials and cursive minuscule, which no longer stay bound between a pair of lines.

These in turn formed the foundations for the Carolingian minuscule

Carolingian minuscule

Carolingian or Caroline minuscule is a script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the small literate class from one region to another....
script, developed by Alcuin

Alcuin

Alcuin of York or Ealhwine, nicknamed Albinus or Flaccus was a scholar, ecclesiastic, poet and teacher from York, Northumbria....
for use in the court of Charlemagne

Charlemagne

Charlemagne was List of Frankish kings from 768 to his death. He expanded the Franks kingdoms into a Carolingian Empire that incorporated much of Western Europe and Central Europe....
, which quickly spread across Europe. Here for the first time it became common to mix both upper and lower case letters in a single text.

The term "lower case" comes from manual typesetting

Typesetting

Typesetting involves the presentation of textual material in graphic form on paper or some other Recording medium. Before the advent of desktop publishing, typesetting of printed material was produced in print shops by compositors or typesetters working by hand, and later with machines....
. Since minuscules were more frequent in text than majuscules, typesetters placed them in the lower and nearer type case
Type case

A type case is a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing....
, while the case with the majuscules (the "upper case") was above and behind, a longer reach.

The word minuscule is often spelled miniscule, by association with the unrelated word miniature and the prefix mini-. This has traditionally been regarded as a spelling mistake (since minuscule is derived from the word minus), but is now so common that some dictionaries tend to accept it as a nonstandard or variant spelling. However, miniscule is still less likely to be used for lower-case letters.

History

Traditionally, "more important" letters—those beginning sentences or noun

Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open class lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition....
s—were made larger; then they were written in a different script, although there was no fixed capitalization system until the early eighteenth century (and even then all nouns were capitalized, a system still followed in German

German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
but not in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
).

Similar developments have taken place in other alphabets. The lower-case script for the Greek alphabet

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
has its origins in the seventh century and acquired its quadrilinear

Writing system

A writing system is a type of symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language....
form in the eighth century. Over time, uncial letter forms were increasingly mixed into the script. The earliest dated Greek lower-case text is the Uspenski Gospels

Uspenski Gospels

Uspenski Gospels, Minuscule 461 are a New Testament Lower case manuscript written in Greek language, dated at 835 AD. They are the oldest known dated manuscript of the New Testament: it was not customary for scribes to date their work at the time....
(MS 461) in the year 835. The modern practice of capitalizing every sentence seems to be imported (and is commonly not used when printing Ancient Greek materials even today).

The Samaritan alphabet

Samaritan alphabet

The Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic language and occasionally Arabic language....
also had lower-case letters, making it relatively unusual among abjad

Abjad

An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel. It is a term suggested by Peter T....
s such as Hebrew

Hebrew alphabet

The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language. Five of these letters have a different form when appearing as the last letter in a word....
, Syriac

Syriac alphabet

The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC. It is one of the Semitic languages abjads directly descending from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician alphabet, Aramaic alphabet, and Hebrew alphabet alphabets....
and Arabic

Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet is the writing system used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic language, Persian language, and Urdu language....
, which tend to be written without case.

Usage

In scripts with a case

Letter case

In orthography and typography, letter case is the distinction between majuscule and Lower case letters. The term originated with the shallow Drawer s called type cases still used to hold the movable type for letterpress printing....
distinction, the lower case is generally used in most texts, and for most of any given text, with the upper case reserved for emphasis and special contexts.

External links

by The Linux Information Project; also includes information on lower case as it relates to computers.

Minuscule

History

Usage

See also

External links