The discussion both in this question and in the one it inspired on ELU seems to conflate two distinct meanings of ‘uppercase’ and ‘lowercase’:īased purely on shape and size, originating in whether a glyph was originally usually stored in the typographer’s upper or lower case (= drawer).īased on functionality, describing what upper- and lowercase letters are used for in modern-day English. Since Europeans copied them, as is, without modification it can be said they swiped the design from the western Muslims. Despite this the modern numerals were a rehash on this idea and the modern form was developed in northern Africa and are distinct from the eastern numerals. Most notably the Zero was invented in India which makes the system work. True the Arabs borrowed the idea form the Persians who borrowed them from India. * Some people want to point out that the numbers came from India. You can see this from the fact that upper and lowercase numbers are the same with just different height characteristics. Since the numbers were copied from a system that was meant to be written with a pen there was no pressure for change. ![]() Uppercase letters were designed for stuff like engraving. This was a later development to make writing easier. It might be worth noting that the roman numeral system also did not have small letters or numbers. Since the original system had no case, neither did the adopted system. That is, all letters are same case, so the notion of big and small numbers is a later development. Remember, our numbers are copied from the Muslim scientists who wrote in Arabic.*Īrabic is unicase. ![]() While upper case numbers do exist, as is shown in vincents answer, they did not originally exist at all.
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