It’s a bloody good question.

What about Roman numerals?

I asked the very same question many many years ago. I still don’t know…

Because grammar doesn’t dictate that we need to differentiate a capital or lower case number…

i would say it is the wrong question and you need to turn it around.

Why do we have capital letters, not why do we have capital numbers.

The simple answer is highlight more important words and phrases.

because theres no need for them. what purpose would they serve?

We have prime numbers instead.

Orders of magnitude take time sink in before you shout about them. (?)

Why don’t we have imaginary letters ??

http://ase.tufts.edu/education/faculty/docs/brizuela/Brizuela1997.pdf

mrmo – Member
i would say it is the wrong question and you need to turn it around.

Why do we have capital letters, not why do we have capital numbers.

The simple answer is highlight more important words and phrases.

As I recall capital letters pre-date lower case. Lower case was invented as it was faster for monks to write when copying out the bible – which was useful before printing was invented.

The conventional letters we use now came a little later I believe.

As I recall capital letters pre-date lower case. Lower case was invented as it was faster for monks to write when copying out the bible – which was useful before printing was invented.

The conventional letters we use now came a little later I believe.

Not so sure, Greek has a set of upper and lower case letters and that goes back at least 2500years, not had a look at Phonician alphabet to see if there are cases there. I know we aren’t using a greek alphabet but much of the latin character set is closely related. I do understand your point though, we have one set of letters and modified it because of a need, there was never a need to do something similar with numbers

I thought we use a Roman alphabet but Arabic numbers. Roman numbers are roman numerals and they can be limiting for larger maths equations. The Arabic version is more adaptable.

There is an equivalent, called lining numerals, where the numbers are different heights, in the same way that lower case has ascenders and descenders, so you could say that regular numbers, which match the X-height of caps, are like capital numbers.
Lining numerals are generally only found with certain serif fonts.
And I don’t have them on my phone to show an example.
[edit] these are what lining numerals look like:

Because…

Capitalization is the difference between “I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse..” and “I had to help my uncle jack off a horse..”

CountZero but there’s no grammatical meaning to them, it’s just a typographical feature.

That’s certainly true. The Bauhaus designed fonts with no caps, and William Borroughs wrote entire books with no capitalisation, though.
But you are right, it’s just a typographic thing.

Yeah by why doesn’t forty have a u in it?

If you really want a kids question to make you think, “Why are some things transparent?”

I’d say that’s probably easier to answer, in a way a kid would understand, than the capitals question.

Ok, answer it. 😉

All the child has to know is that materials are made up of tiny building blocks (atoms) and that light interacts with those building blocks in different ways, like firing balls (light) at a forest (atoms). If the balls and trees are the right spacings the balls will pass through most times, if the trees are tightly packed or are organised in certain ways the balls will not pass through the forest but will either bounce back (reflection) or get stuck inside the object (absorbtion). That should suffice until they hit high school.

Where did you go to primary school? I’m pretty sure I didn’t have the first notion of what an atom was at the age of 10!

But that’s not right. Nobody really knows why glass is transparent but silica isn’t.

Of course people will come up with some very clever explanations about why some things are transparent and other things aren’t but they don’t know. You can google some very bright people getting very excited about it but they don’t say, “this is the precise reason why amber is transparent and steel is not”. It’s all conjecture. Sand is sand, you heat it up and do stuff and it’s see-through. Wny? Glass doesn’t reflect like sand does? What’s changed?

Age 10? Think you probably did. Atoms and electrons were not new to us when we entered secondary school. We didn’t know much about them, only their existence and what they “look” like in the classical nucleus/electron sort of way. We did have fairly science-happy primary school teachers though. 😐

samuri – not strictly correct but gives a functional representation a kid will understand. The actual answer, which I am led to believe has been understood for a few decades, is that the light interacts with the sub-atomic particles (electrons primarily) and depending on the energy of the wavelength of light impacting the substance and the possible energy states of the electrons in the material impacted, it will either be absorbed or allowed to pass through. None of the energy levels of visible light match the discrete energy levels of the electrons in glass’s structure, and so none are absorbed. Deep UV, on the other hand, is absorbed by glass as the energy levels coincide. As for the glass/silica point, that could be because glass and silica have differing crystal structures (slightly) (glass isn’t JUST sand) and as such differing electron energy levels are available to absorb the visible wavelengths? Add that to the fact that sand is a mass of interfaces – take glass and crush it to a powder and you’ll not see through that either because of the scattering effect of the surfaces and angles presented to the light.