From: Grzegorz Rolek
>> Unicode encodes the characters C and c (S and s, etc) at separate code
> points. The only difference is one of context in just about exactly the
> same way. The big ones go at the start of sentences (or indeed nouns in
> German), and the small ones go elsewhere. Their original context in
> *fonts* is described by the fact that a font consisted of two containers
> (cases) full of letters, one above the other. The letters C and S were
> found in the 'upper case' and the letters 'c and s' were found in the
> 'lower case'. My own feeling is that the context analogy is so close,
> that one can essentially think of upper and lower case clefs, or, if you
> don't like that, one is a clef and the other is a clef-change.<<<
> Well, that's not quite correct. The case-related terms is a much later
artefact of what was originally known as two distinct writing systems,
namely, Roman capitals (developed in Ancient Rome) and Carolingian
minuscule (developed under the Emperor Charlemagne hundreds of years
later, revived in Renaissance by Italian humanists). Use of both systems
in post-medieval practice was interdependent enough that up to this day
you can't express clearly intended meaning without specifying one or the
other. The choice is not strictly mechanical and fonts alone won't do.<
My apologies: I had implicitly assumed, for the discussion of 'fonts', a
context of 'printing' - and indeed printing with movable type, which came
along hundreds of years after the development of Carolingian minuscule by
Alcuin and others in the 8th Century IIRC. I wasn't really thinking of
anything earlier than the 15th century printing presses as being at all
relevant. And of course it was the advent of printing which standardised
all sorts of things.
(But then I still think of the word 'font' in the original sense of a
collection of cast metal type: it could never have been applied to writing
in the 8th century.)
I still see small clefs and larger ones as being very much analogous to
lower and upper case letters in a 'font', with position in the music being
analogous to position in a word or sentence (whether or not the choice is
'strictly mechanical'). The other analogy of different versions of Arabic
letters is a good one too.
Dave
David Webber
Mozart Music Software
http://www.mozart.co.uk/#############################################################
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