Change of writing style

St Johns Gospel written in lowercase

The Greek alphabet has been around since approximately 750 BCE according to (Omniglot) it was developed from the Canaanite/Phoenician alphabet.  Over the centuries it changed and became more standardised, local areas had their versions of the Greek alphabet. The direction of the writing was horizontal lines either left to right or alternating right to left, in approximately 500 BCE the direction standardised and became lines left to right in horizontal lines.

A major change occurred around the end of the eighth century in Hellenic script as (Staikos 2000) informs us. Manuscripts previous to the end of the eighth century were written in capitals. From this point of time we see the use of lower script, the change allowed the writers to be more efficient as they were able to write more on each page with the reduced size of the text. Punctuation marks and the dividing of words which was rare up to this point, made it easier to read and understand what was written. During the ninth century this process becomes standard practice and  most manuscripts are recopied in the lower case format, (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1980) agrees.

I found it tough to find information regarding the change in style from uppercase to lower case, in authoritative resources. It led me to write about the origins of the Hellenic alphabet, something I did not have in mind when I started to write the post. After a great deal of time reading through websites that I have not listed for they cannot be regarded as more than some persons opinion on a subject .  I would have thought that with such a great revolution in writing at the time, a more in depth study of why the change happened and when it did would have surfaced in the materials I was reading. It felt as though I was putting in a lot of time on this post with little to present.

St Cyril

My idea was to locate information regarding why at the end of the eighth century did they alter their script to lowercase. Why not before?  Who authorized it? Did Arabic writing have an influence? Was there a connection with St Cyril (pictured above) a Byzantine who at the same period in time created the Slavic alphabet which is based on the Hellenic alphabet. I could not trace any resource that would create a link.

During this post I also found it difficult to locate pictures on Flickr that I would be able to use on the blog. The tags that are being used aren't necessarily correct and without having some prior knowledge to what Hellenic text should look like it would have been quite easy to post a picture of a manuscript that was either written in Latin or Aramaic. The picture above although it is in lowercase script is probably not the best example of efficient use of a page though it was the best example in creative commons on Flickr.

Staikos, K 2000, The great libraries: from antiquity to the renaissance, Oak Knoll Press, Delaware.

Encyclopaedia Britannica 1980

Omniglot the online encyclopedia of writing systems & languages, Greek alphabet, viewed 21 October 2012, <http://omniglot.com/writing/greek.htm>