So I’ll presume we can all agree that in modern English, we generally converse about “upper case” letters or “lower case” letters. To the best of my knowledge and understanding, this terminology dates back only a few hundred years, to the mid 1400’s, roughly, when Gutenberg invented the printing press and printers started storing letters in cases. But English goes back to roughly the 600s, and written language surely predates that, wherein I should imagine there was a need to differentiate between what we now call “upper case” vs. “lower case”.
The phrase for “upper case” is easy; we use it all the time when we capitalize properly the necessary words in a sentence. Always the first character. Sometimes others. So if you tell a person just learning the rules of capitalization, or letter case you will say “The first letter of each sentence is to be capitalized” we all get that. My question is: what is the opposite, but without using the phrase “lower case”? “The first letter of each sentence is to be lower case” makes perfect sense today, but what would they have called it before Gutenberg & Co. did their thing?
Discuss.
I’ve seen the terms uppercase/majuscule and lowercase/miniscules used. But surely we have an English major amongst us with the correct answer.
When in doubt, just negate it.
“The first letter of each sentence is not to be capitalized.”
At a guess, all caps may not have been a thing before the advent of moveable type, in which case, proper capitalization would only have the context of which words beyond the first word of a sentence were deemed appropriate to be capitalized. Likely the only antonym would have been uncapitalized, as the useage wouldn’t have been common enough for its own word.
I find it amusing that my “research” suggests the opposite: “all caps” (or “majuscule”) was THE thing in written works in the years leading up to Gutenberg &Co.'s overtaking of the “Monks with plumes” method of duplicated written word.This means to me I would expect the “new kid on the block” to have a name. I would expect “capital letters” to be just “letters”, and lower case to be “special unknown adjective letters”. Instead, it appears to me, it’s the other way round…
i suspect not english is legible either way capitalization is a convenience to help the reader even punctuation is usually optional
So, pre-Gutenberg, the very idea of having two sets of symbols may have been so novel that there was no need for words to describe the idea.
Which would be Third Order of Ignorance for us if we lived then (we all now know about the Orders of Ignorance) and Fourth Order of Ignorance for those living at the time. It is really difficult to get past the Third Order.
If my quick google return is accurate, I amwas operating at a 4OI…
Who can tell I’ve never developed a system?
Did you find the original article or a summary?
(In my opinion, things written by Phillip G. Armour are always worth reading.)
This’n.
http://www.corvusintl.com/CACM002-5OI.htm
Just went far enough to confirm I had no idea what you were talking about. Oh, and then far enough to figure out why you think this stuff is common knowledge. 
SHOULD read the article. It’s linked on there. But I did not make it…yet…
I sent this question to my wife who is a Librarian. I’ll let you know if she comes up with anything.
When learning to write way back when (i.e. on a chalkboard), non-capitals were referred to as “small”, e.g if the first word in a sentence you are to spell is “cat”, then you would tell the teacher, or vice versa: “it’s capital ‘C’, small ‘a’, small ‘t’”). Or as correct, using the word “little” instead of “small”.
As I picture a page from an illuminated manuscript, there’s usually a big illuminated letter at the beginning of the page, and the rest is all the same case. That does seem to depend on the writer (and scriptorium).
So I googled 15th ce script, and the one I chose to look at has big and little letters, although a quick scan looks like they are all formed the same way (just sized differently)
Here’s the link: http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/examples/batarde4.htm
I notice that they’ve got the fancy decorated letters at 2 spots that are inside the lines, not starting the page off. The whole concept of rules about writing is probably more modern than this era. Given that folks didn’t get antsy about regularizing spelling until the 1800’s, I wouldn’t expect rules/guidelines about writing to have started much sooner.
minuscule
Letter case (or just case) is the distinction between the letters that are in larger upper case (also uppercase, capital letters, capitals, caps, large letters, or more formally majuscule) and smaller lower case (also lowercase, small letters, or more formally minuscule) in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper and lower case have two parallel sets of letters, with each letter in one set usually having an equivalent in the other set. The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and will be treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order.
Wikipedia to the rescue?
Before moveable type, and to a lesser extent after, the distinction between what we refer to as capitals and little letters varied depending on the language and time and place. For example, early Irish uncial did not have 2 sets of letterforms. On the other hand, Gothic hands, especially German do tend to have both capitals and small letters (majescule and miniscule). Perhaps why Gutenberg developed this idea with his moveable type. The large decorative letters in illuminated manuscripts were to illustrate something in the text (usually) and had nothing to do with capitalization.
And as far as 600 AD, we were not speaking English. Most literate communication was in Latin. We don’t really start to develop an English vernacular till the early 1300’s, maybe. Try reading Chaucer in the original old English - it is truly a foreign language. Shakespeare is usually cited as middle English or very early modern English.Somewhere in the process is what they call “the great vowel shift”, which altered a lot of our pronunciation. And spelling did not even start to become regular till Noah Webster published his dictionary. The history of our language is very interesting, and convoluted.
I find it interesting that “capitalization” of specific words appears to have “been a thing” at the same time as the dawning of English as a language, roughly the 5th century, through its maturation in, roughly, the 15th century. Latin writings from the 6th century or so (like this one) are in what I would (in my massively under informed, undereducated opinion) call “all caps” (majuscule, I think, is the modern paleographer’s phrase of choice). By the 15th century, there are examples of what I would consider “modern” capitalization: first character in a sentence, proper names, etc. The Gutenberg Bible itself would be one such example. This papal butt-kiss memo would be another. These lead me to believe that sometime between the 500s and 1400s the notion of “capitalization” in its modern sense existed. However, these demonstrate that the majority of the running text was “something else” (I believe now referred to as “minuscule” by paleographers, but I think that is a neologism) while some special words were capitalized. Especially interesting to me is that this apparently became quite the trend moving forward from the ~1450s such that by the time this medieval text appears, virtually every noun is capitalized (as is done in modern German, I’m told). You can also see this in the US Constitution (ca. 1787) . Sometime in the 19th century, though, English language grammarians decided that the “amok” usage needed reining in, and instituted rules much more like (in my, again, well-undereducated opinion) those seen in the earlier writings such as this, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye from here, largely considered to be the first book printed in English.
Yet we still don’t REALLY have a (functional, in daily-use, known to every school child) word for “non capital” letters, nor for the act of not capitalizing a letter, even though that would be the “normal” thing, and at some point had to transition from “all majuscule” to “mostly minuscule”. Instead we employ “patch phrases”, like “small” or “lowercase” for an action/writing device which most certainly predates the use of cases for letter storage.
Language is interesting…
Here is one especially interesting site on the history of English (not technically pertinent to this conversation except for context).
German has a history of capitalizing nouns, so it’s not surprising that Gutenberg had upper and lower case letters.
Ve Germans prefer our words to be Orderly, vankyouwerymuch.
Two notes/corrections:
From my college courses, the earliest ‘English’ is more like 1100 - 1066ff with the merging of French and Anglo-Saxon.
And it is likely that my memory is correct that “upper case” and “lower case” refer to the positions of the boxes or cases of loose lead type for hand setting type. The upper case was further away so a longer reach than the much more commonly used small letters in the lower case. I actually had the satisfaction of using such a setup in the Maker-type student space at M.I.T. in the 1960s. Of course, putting the type back in the case after doing the job was not quite so much fun!
I hope you remembered to “mind your p’s and q’s” when putting the type back 