Case is a uniquely European script phenomenon, and one that came late in the development of most of the scripts (Cyrillic, because it was the last of the European scripts to be developed has the shortest time between its unicameral origins and the development of upper- and lowercase).

I have a book published in the 1920s with a forward by Stanley Morison, by an author who attempted to enhance the Hebrew alphabet by introducing upper and lower case letterforms to it as well as to bring the letter forms more in line with the styles of the Latin-Greek-Cyrillic alphabets. It's—odd.

> I have a book published in the 1920s with a forward by Stanley Morison, by an author who attempted to enhance the Hebrew alphabet by introducing upper and lower case letterforms to it as well as to bring the letter forms more in line with the styles of the Latin-Greek-Cyrillic alphabets. It's—odd.

Before the eventual standardization of Hangul around early 20th century there were numerous attempts to "linearize" Hangul's characteristic syllabic blocks ("풀어쓰기" [1]). Many of them were influenced by Western alphabets and had two cases, and none were successful. And yes, they are also odd.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Linear_Korean

When I was an undergrad, I wrote some algorithms for composing Hangul letters into the "ideographs" in Metafont. It was kind of fun to build. The whole east-Asian font project was too ambitious and never got finished though. I was trying to enable algorithmic composition not just of Hangul but also Kanji/Hanzi from radicals but the latter was not as amenable to algorithmic composition.

And it's worth mentioning how relatively recently case was "invented" even for Latin and Greek/Greek-derived scripts (including Cyrillic, and probably Latin itself technically...)

The way we write modern text is more modern than most people realize, I think. The letter 'j' wasn't really used as a separate letter indicating a separate sound until sometime around the 16th century I think! Case is older, but not ancient. I've seen some Greek on 3rd/4th century middle eastern ruins and I struggle to read the "all upper case with no spaces" writing sometimes, but that's just how it was! No "lower case" until much later...

The characters we think of as lower case were starting to take familiar forms around the 3rd century, but they were just the handwritten form of the language. One set of letters with clear sharp lines that can be worked into stone, and another with curves that can be quickly handwritten.

> One set of letters with clear sharp lines that can be worked into stone

This was never a goal; look at B ϴ O P Φ Ψ Ω, or on the Latin end C G Q R S.

Inscriptions are very formal; you carve the letters you have no matter what they look like. There was never any difficulty carving curves.

Handwriting is informal; you write whatever you find easiest.

Arabic script has a vaguely similar concept of a given letter having multiple (up to 3) forms. The form depends on what letters precede and/or succeed it (if any).

That has nothing to do with emphasis though.

Neither do uppercase letterforms. Uppercase individual letters aren't emphasized, that's just grammar, much like Hebrew's final letters that are only used at the end of words (I'm guessing these indicated the ends of words to assist reading when spacing wasn't used--I've certainly found it useful as such).

Gurmukhi script also has no case difference, but has something like symbols, which adds sounds like nn ann, u in put or cut