english, the language with capital and small letters :-)

not once in these many years of my life and education, have i ever thought of this! neither questioned nor taught!! strange!!!

why does english have capital and small letters when others languages i have learnt do not have so (for eg. tamil or hindi)??

why this question in my mind after acquiring a doctoral degree in my discipline with english as the medium of study??!!!

at 3 years of her age, my daughter has now learned to identify almost all letters in english and writes quite a few! all in caps! interestingly, i did not realize that she wasn’t taught small letters, as learning caps is easier for children with mere shapes.

                                          pic courtesy: google images

last week, when she held her hindu’s young world in her tiny hands and started reading alphabet, i had this realization that she could spell only the headlines and rest seem to be greek and latin.

that is when i googled to know why english has capital and small letters when the language could do well with one like other languages. the answers google offered me are just two in number (1) small letters were designed to write faster in comparison to writing a whole text in caps (2) to distinctly show that a sentence begins. of late, it has become a trend to capitalize words to lay emphasis on something.

now my child has to undergo yet another whole lot of learning of the 26 letters. sigh:-(

not that learning is difficult for my daughter when her own mother tongue has 247 letters which is amazingly huge when compared to english. and also children learn things in such a short time.. but as parents our roles need more effort to make her not unlearn those capital letters and in addition learn the new ones with an understanding that both letters are same when they are not so in shapes for those simple reasons!

anyways, i am not convinced with answers as to why english has this distinction. i now feel that the language could exist only with small letters when it is originally designed only for convenience and it could have done away with capital letters.

because it would have made english alphabet learning clearer for my daughter, at the least :-) of course, nothing needs to change now. but after all i am a parent who tends to think of everything my child faces on earth!!! ;-) i know it might sound a way too much for some of you. never mind, you have just finished reading the whole text only in small letters. 

THANK YOU :-)