Single case

[Jonathan Buhacoff]

Proposal:

Have only one version of a letter instead of an uppercase and lowercase version. Instead of using uppercase to start a sentence or mark a proper noun, use separate symbols or modifiers for these ideas that can be applied to any letter.

Use a symbol to indicate that a line is a continued from another page and that the first word is not the beginning of the sentence.

Intent:

Instead of wasting learning time on two versions of the same letter, additional letters can be introduced for additional sounds (see also sounds and symbols).

Instead of using an alternate version of a letter to indicate a proper noun, use a symbol or modifier that can be applied to any letter to indicate a proper noun. The modifier can be applied to just the first letter of the noun, or to the first letter of every word in the noun, or to the entire noun, or surrounding the noun.

Discussion:

In school, when students write a sentence and fail to capitalize a proper noun, the teacher underscores the first letter of the proper noun. This, or another modifier, could simply be the way that proper nouns are indicated instead of capitalizing letters.

There are texts written in all uppercase letters. In these texts, there is no way to indicate a proper noun because all letters are already uppercase. Yet, people are usually able to discern proper nouns in these texts. Rather than suggest no indications at all, this proposal suggests indications that can be applied to all uppercase letters, or all lowercase letters, or mixed case letters. This proposal goes a step further and suggests that if we can do that, we don’t really need two sets of cases — instead of uppercase and lowercase, we just need one set of letters, and we can use the new modifier (whatever it will be) to indicate proper nouns.

Capitalizing the first letter of a sentence wouldn’t be necessary if there’s only one case. In the middle of a paragraph, people know one sentence ends with a period and the next sentence starts after that. This also works with all-uppercase text. A new sentence or new paragraph indicator is needed to start a text and to help readers identify whether the first sentence of a page is a new sentence or a continuation of a sentence from the previous page. One option is to mark new sentences or paragraphs. Another option is to assume that beginning of text is a new sentence or paragraph and only mark a continuation, for example “(cont.) and more text here”.

Marking new sentences and paragraphs in some way would become tedious because most text is on the page and it’s obvious where sentences end because of periods and where paragraphs end because of spacing, so an additional marking is redundant. It only really helps with page breaks.

Marking only continuations is convenient because just the last line of a page and the first line of the next page would need to be indicated if the continuation method is used and only if the sentence or paragraph is split across the two pages.

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