Capitals in an uncial alphabet - historical models - 2 of 9

There are so many fascinating questions here, and of course there are always impossible compromises when you do a historical pastiche: everyone has to choose their own compromises and everyone will have different ideas as to what works and what doesn't-

I still remember the hurt I felt when my carefully-researched and thoroughly thought-out work, creating a bridge between modern musicians and renaisance musical notation, was dismissed by the professor in Nottingham as 'fakesimile' ...

The uncial alphabet, developed under the emperor Charlemagne around 800 AD from earlier Roman models, is delightful: round and simple, grateful to read and to write.

But historically, English was never written in that kind of hand: at the time that alphabet was used, the language of England was not yet English but Anglo-Saxon and that has, for one thing, different shapes for some of the letters it has in common with Latin, and for another, some letters which aren't used in Latin. Examples are

• 'Abraham' on the left here
• the letter which looks like a 'p' in the middle of this illustration, but is a 'thorn', corresponding to the modern hard, aspirated, 'th' in its name
• and the 'eth' - the d-with-a-stroke-through-it - corresponding to the modern soft, voiced, 'th').

By the time the language had evolved to anything you can call 'English', writing had changed significantly: the Carolingian uncial style had been replaced by various black-letter 'gothic' styles;

'Charlemagne' = 'Charles the Great' - 'Charles' = 'Carolus' in Latin, hence 'Carolingian'

and the Italians had given a rebirth to the classical alphabets that belonged to their rediscovered classical texts.

So if you live in the 21st Century and choose to use a 9thC. Latin alphabet to present something written in an imitation of 16thC. English, you can expect that some things will need to be adapted.

We'll look here at the question of what to do about capitals.