The metaphor suggests some deep connection between writing and the earth. This manuscript style is called boustrophedon: bous (ox) + strophe (turn)-"as the ox turns," referring to the way an ox and plow go back and forth across a field. For a while, they wrote in both directions: they might start out writing from left to right, and when they ran out of room they would work their way back from right to left, and then turn from left to right again. This probably accounts for the backward orientation of some of the letters, like that aleph that went from a K to a backwards K before settling into alpha: A. At first, they wrote from right to left, like the Phoenicians (Hebrew is still written from right to left), but then they switched and wrote from left to right. Greeks did not put any spaces between the words, SOTHEREADERHADTOFIGUREOUTWHEREONEWORDLEFTOFFANDTHEOTHERBEGAN. The uppercase and lowercase letters are also called by the Latinate terms majuscule and miniscule (major and minor). Printers organized type into drawers, or cases, and kept the capitals in a higher case and reached down into a case below the upper case for the small letters ergo lowercase. I am reluctant to refer to the small letters as "lowercase," because that term-as well as uppercase, for capital letters-comes from movable type and is anachronistic. They had only the capital letters-small letters were developed in the Middle Ages, to speed up writing and save on parchment. If you think Greek is hard to read now, you should have seen it when the Greeks were just starting out. Photo: Used with permission of the publisher, W.
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