The History of Lowercase Letters

Lower case letters evolved, essentially, from monks being lazy and accidentally making new letter forms, which then became the standard. Here, let me show you some very vague examples:

Some of the letter forms are underlined in pink; those denote uncials. There are a lot of things integral to the history of the English alphabet, and just the history of alphabets in general (it’s really obvious, for example, when we stopped using chisels and started using flowing-ink quills, historically), and for English, you gotta know about uncials (and their cousin insular).

For the English alphabet, there’s a hugely influential script called uncials. Uncials, and various other scripts (blackletter, for example) emerged in the middle ages, where no one was communicating with each other and everyone was illiterate; as such the way people wrote began to shift by region, and different fonts evolved. If we’d gone like this another 1000 years, we probably would have developed entirely new alphabets. Uncials today are preserved as a fun-timey font mostly used to denote Irishness (uncials and insular were popularized hugely by Irish missionaries, and originate in Ireland), but at one point they were one of the most popular and influential script types. as such a lot of our lowercase styles come from uncials, because it was basically a weird mutation of uppercase roman script (influenced by roman cursive).

But then, in the Victorian era and early 1900s, children began to learn English in large bunches, and widespread literacy became a growing concern; as such, educators ‘simplified’ the alphabet for widespread public consumption, and letters were crammed into the shapes we’re familiar with them now. Still, the influence and change originally comes from overworked monks.