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You're quite correct. The old 'Latin' script (our uppercase letters) where revived in the renaissance - and were slowly merged with the Hunnish script (our lower case letters) - about the same time as they adopted Arabic numerals (read right to left, for added confusion).

Other alphabets (Greek and Cyrillic) created capital letters in emulation much later (circa 1800's). Most alphabets/sylabaries (Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, etc) don't have upper and lower cases.

Likewise punctuation, which prosidic languages (like English) need to signal stress and emphasis which can transform meaning, but which are also absent from lots of other writing systems.

I think talk of 'more modern' or 'less modern' is nonsense though. Writing is an imperfect representation of speaking, and whatever works is just fine.



Hebrew has upper and lower case.


No—there are cursive and block letters, but one is not the lower case version of the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet




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