Ask Lemmy

There's no capitalization in written Chinese.

But there is a "upper case" for writing numbers. Its set of very complex characters meant for writing contracts so you can't easily tamper with it.

Like "一" (one) could be easily changed to a "十" (ten) with just one stroke, but "壹" also means "one", but you can't add strokes to change it, any attempt at tampering with contracts/documents would be easily noticed. Usually this is never used in every-day life.

(Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Ordinary_numerals)

It's not really "capitalization" but more like writing "One Thousand Dollars" instead of "$1000"

Idk what you mean by "emphasis", but there is no difference between proper nouns and common nouns. I mean, there is italics and bold if written digitally. Or underlining it if written on paper.

(I'm Chinese-American btw)

Thai does not have upper case letters.

It does have a character that essentially means duplicate the previous word which is a common way to pluralize or emphasize:

Child = เด็ก “dèk”
Children = เด็กเด็ก or เด็กๆ “dèkdèk”

Pretty = งาม “ngaam”
Pretty! = งามงาม or งามๆ “ngaamngaam”

Japanese has three alphabets (and the English alphabet... and those Arabic numbers we are all familiar with)

• Hiragana (ひらがな) for native words, grammar, and morphology - it reminds me of cursive
• Katakana (カタカナ) it gives an unmistakable clue you are reading a foreign word - but can also be used for emphasis
• Kanji (漢字) borrows Chinese characters that can be read with native or borrowed sounds, but generally with the same meaning

Given those and the English letters at your fingertips they have a lot of tools to give context. Grab a newspaper or Manga sometime, even if you don't know the words you can tell each writing system apart pretty easily.

None of Chinese Japanese, Korean, Arabic or Hebrew have an uppercase. I believe the Cyrillic alphabet does. That's Russian Serbian etc.

Serif and sans serif is not about emphasis? Its pretty much just design and can be included in pretty much any script. The claim used to be that there was a difference in reading speed bw the two but thats not true. Thats not a linguistic feature but a design feature.

Now italics are tough in most non latin languages. In written form emphasis can be shown by font size, placement of words, color or even spacing.

I think I remember hearing about using a dot with some vertical Asian language to show emphasis too. (Was a Yt short so weak memory)

Korean does not. BUT, we, sometimes and almost exclusively online, use whitespace(plus exclamation mark) between each characters to emphasize.

망했다 -> 망 했 다!

I can only answer for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages. Others have answered the first point, but on "showing emphasis":

I can confirm that in modern, information-age CJK languages, people also use things like italic, boldface, and other equivalents not too different from English. Notably though the punctuation marks are distinct Unicode letters (they are all full-length instead of half-length) different from their Germanic/Romance counterparts; the Japanese quotation marks are probably the most fun example. As for font type... Chinese has a long evolution history so there are in fact a variety of fonts baked into its history, some of which are very cursed

If you are referring to pre-information-age... there is the concept of Isochrony on Wikipedia but I think it's more for individual words. Emphasis can be shown by how you speak a language and stress certain words... but then CJK are all high-context languages so there are lots of nuances

Russian Cyrillic here.

Yes, there are both upper- and lowercase letters. Most kinda look like the same letter.

Yes, there are serif and sans-serif fonts. I haven't noticed any difference in use between the Russian and the English alphabets in that regard -- serif is more prevalent in books and printed media, while sans-serif rules the digital (and maybe headings and headlines in printed).

As for the emphasis, the Russian alphabet and fonts (at least the popular ones) do support emphasis, like bold, italics, etc., but italics is used much less liberally. For example, I often see italics used in English to either make the reader emphasize a word or a phrase differently, or to make a name of a piece of fiction stand out (e.g. Dishonored vs Dishonored). I can't recall a single time I've seen the former being used in Russian, neither in fiction, nor on the Internet -- the only thing somewhat close to it would be in-universe letters or writings, but those are often put in their own paragraph with different margins and all.

The italics in the Russian digital fonts is not the same as the Russian or Cyrillic cursive, though. While the latter may be vastly different from the printed letters, varying by the age group (older generations have pretty different cursive from people my age, especially with some letters like the lowercase T), the former is basically the same style shift as in the Latin alphabets. For example:

• Regular: Съешь же ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю.
• Italics: Съешь же ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю.

As for the Russian cursive, I would say it's actually closer to the printed Russian than the English cursive is to the printed English. There are some letters that often tend to blend together in cursive, such as the lowercase И, Л, Ш, Щ, but with proper spacing, they're really easy to tell apart; especially given how they're not that often that close to each other in most sentences.

The cursive English lowercase F, on the other hand, or uppercase S, or lowercase R, for example, left me guessing the first few times I saw them.

So, the Russian, or the Cyrillic alphabets are pretty boring in that regard when compared to the Latin-based alphabets of Europe. The region may be vast and varied, but its peoples are still pretty close and similar to each other.

Hindi or any Indic languages (popular ones) have any case differentiation.

Mostly because emphasis on any word is not literal it is tonal.

So there are these things called - matra (12 matras in hindi)

They are symbols representing inflection/emphasis etc. and we can combine them with each character of the alphabet and convey tone.

Hebrew does not have capital letters. But it does have "cursive": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_Hebrew . In Hebrew it's usually just called "handwriting" (כתב, כתב יד) as opposed to "print" (דפוס). The letters don't flow into each other like they do in Latin cursive. They're just faster to write.

In Unicode, each letter has just a single code point: e.g. ק is Hebrew Letter Qof (U+05E7). If you want cursive, you use a cursive font, but it's still the same character.

Some letters have a different final form: if they are the last letter in a word, they look different. These are encoded as different characters, for example: the final form of צ Hebrew Letter Tsadi (U+05E6) is ץ Hebrew Letter Final Tsadi (U+05E5). There is a separate key for it on the keyboard.

There's also niqqud, which takes the job of vowels, but that's a whole other can of worms and isn't used in everyday writing. It's only very rarely used to clarify an otherwise ambiguous word.

Cyrillic has upper & lower case, with accents on both. There are serif, sans, display and most weights as well as many other categories, just like in latin scripts. If by 'emphasis' you mean italic, yes, there is Italic, and it's very different from the standard upper & lower case. Cyrillic Cursive is almost like another alphabet in Cyrillic.

Japanese has no uppercase/lowercase. Italics (oblique type) is generally unused as a standard. Bolding can be used but uncommon in most writing. Underlining is commonly used for emphasis. Quotation marks are sometimes used to emphasize in the way "air quotes" would be. It's rather antiquated but dots or Japanese commas above or beside (in vertical writing) can be used where italics might be used in English.

Sans-serif and serif have their equivalents in CJK langauges - in Japanese they are called Gothic and Mincho type respectively. With Gothic every line maintains the same width. Mincho uses the traditional standard where line widths vary according to each stroke, the rules are derived from how it was written by brush. Calligraphic writing takes this to an extreme and is more of an art-form on special paper, depending on your intent you can follow the traditional rules or be a bit more creative.

Greek definitely has upper and lowercase. Arabic and Persian do as well, but also rules on glyphs (different letter-shapes based on proximate letter combinations), as well as small accents that change the pronunciations.

All have hand-written (cursive or calligraphy) vs typewritten variations, including fixed-width vs variable fonts.

Serifs are display attributes, mostly for latin alphabets. But greek lettering have had them too, albeit in subtle, light versions. The modern didone (thick) or slab serifs didn't show up until 18th Century.

Do languages that use non-Latin alphabets (Asian, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew) have upper and lower case letters?

Greek has upper and lower case. From mathematics/physics you may have come across e.g. the ones for sigma (Σ, σ). Cyrillic also has them; most look the same between the upper & lower case variants, just bigger/smaller (Л, л), but there are some that differ (А, а).

I don't think most Asian scripts have letter cases. Javanese script does have upper case but only for a small subset of letters and they are generally not used anymore.

What about serif or sans-serif?

Cyrillic and Greek, yes. There are also equivalents to the serif and sans-serif typefaces in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean typography.

How do they show emphasis?

On the Web, boldface (but not italics) is very commonly used across various writing systems. Obviously no all caps for those without capital letters.

Speaking for the Arabic abjad: No, no and we don't.

Follow up.. Can you do mocking in Kanji or Arabic?

example: DoNt Do ThAt