Why two sets? (updated)
Friday, October 5, 2007 at 9:29PM Jr. was having some fun with an english workbook she got as a gift. This is now our usual routine in the evenings.
Today she had to answer a question which was :
_______ went to swim.
the three choices were
Him
I
i
She figured out that Him was wrong as soon as she read that option.
Then she looked at me and asked me a very profound question.
"Daddy, why do we need two set of letters with all this uppercase and lowercase stuff? Why can't we have just all uppercase or all lowercase?"
I really do not have an answer for that one! Why? Why?
Now, I have a question for my parents!
Was I smart or lazy enough to ask that question when I was learning english? and if I did, were you proud of me?
Why do we need two sets of letters people? Answer me!
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Anon commenter... Just a thought!
THIS IS SHOUTING
THIS IS NOT SHOUTING
i rest my case
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now I have another question.. Does Tamizh have ! in the alphabet, punctuation.. I have to go and read about the history of punctuation marks. Tonight's homework..
.
Reader Comments (6)
wow, never thought of that before. and now i wonder if upper and lower case letters are there only in English. The languages that I know (which aren't that many) don't have two sets of letters. hmmmmmmmm...
1. To distinguish proper nouns from actual words. So if you had to use clay and Clay in the same sentence you'd know which clay you are referring to.
2. They possibly invented the lower/upper casing stuff before they invented punctuations. So this was used to indicate beginning of sentences.
Ok if you did'nt figure out that I was making all this stuff by now, you really don't know me :)
I would have thought such an explanation would have come to you naturally, being an egghead...but they do say that once you have kids your IQ drops exponentially ;) (this only applies to dads) ;)
I would imagine that upper and lowercase serve some purpose in that you can EMPHASIZE with uppercase. And although e-mail is a fairly new thing to the English language/world - it just doesn't do right to go about SPELLING EVERYTHING IN CAPS and yelling at everyone. ;)
Also - think of the functions you have by having two sets of letters - you're allowed to abbreviate concisely without causing too much confusion (take LASER for example - Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation - now where would you, the PhD in materials engineering be). Although LASER - probably isn't the best example - because now it's commonplace to write it in lowercase - now that it's become so engrained in the culture. (But then again, how many people outside of the scientific field know that LASER is actually an acronym and technically should be all uppercase?)
But you are suggesting more emphasis by capitalizing... ;)
and while your at it...some more food for thought - why do we have so many 'na's in Tamil, and so many 'la's? Never been able to find out where to use the rendu suli 'na' or the moonru suli 'na'!!!
Still emphasizing... ;)