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Comment by rflrob | Hacker News Reader

It might be folly to try to argue with language anti-evolutionists, but when spacing was added to scripts (according to the author, most recently during the middle ages), minuscule and majuscule were not consistently used at the beginning of sentences. One could make the point that we only really need spacing OR case differences, and don't need both.

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Indeed, Paul Saenger, the scholar I quote in the article, writes that during the transitional period, capitals were sometimes used to mark word boundaries in run-together text. Unexpectedly, though, the last letter of a word was more often capitalized than the first.

This reminded me that Commodore BASIC (among others, as this is in no way restricted to that platform, and is a common technique), had bit 5 set in the last byte of each word in its keyword list to signal the end of the word. This had the effect of capitalizing the last letter, and avoided the need for a delimiter character on that memory strapped platform.

hmmm, perhaps conserving paper was also a reason for running words together, and cheaper paper (e.g. from improved trade routes/technology) enabled the reintroduction of spaces.

I'm not sure whether you're aware of this, but many older scripts, including all of the Semitic scripts, actually write letters entirely differently when they appear at the end of a word. Given that the monks who began employing majuscule and minuscule would surely have been familiar with Hebrew script, I'm hardly surprised they initially went to making the last letter significant instead of the first.

That also true for the long s (ſ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s -- it's only used at the start or in the middle of words. The same is true for sigma, σ is used in the start and middle of words, while ς is used in the end of words.

Not all Hebrew letters are different when they appear at the end of a word, just 4 out of 22 letters (if I remember correctly) do.

It's true of Arabic, though; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Primary_letters.

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