CAPITALS,

[Pafra & Scott Catledge]

----- Original Message -----
From: Diana Ben-Aaron <benaaron at CC.HELSINKI.FI>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 1999 5:10 AM
Subject: CAPITALS, glossaries, "like"


Concatenating replies to save header space; sorry if it inconveniences
anyone.

1. CAPITAL LETTERS.  Everything that has been said so far jibes with what
I've heard. Two devil's advocate questions:

a) If capital letters are harder to read, why was the old typewriter font
called Orator, designed for typing speeches in big letters, an all-caps
font?  OK, there were large caps and small caps, but they were all caps.

b) If letters without ascenders and descenders are harder to read, how has
e.g. the Cyrillic alphabet survived without significant modification?
One of the reasons I've had a hard time learning to read Russian, Hebrew,
Chinese, etc. is that these require making fine discriminations about
features in the interior of a character, rather than just recognizing the
overall shape of a word.

I've never worked with Chinese; however, I suspect that religion
had much to do with preserving both the Hebrew and Russian
alphabets with minimal change.  For real fun in Russian, have you
tried tackling Russian handwriting?  As for ORATOR, perhaps it
served the function in speaking that "qwerty" did in typing.  ;{)  Scott