Unicase alphabets have only one case for each letter, making them easier to learn and write. They are common in Middle Eastern and Eastern European languages with complicated symbols and accents. Some languages, like Tamil, have unicase for convenience, while Arabic and Hebrew need it for practicality. Unicase is also used in Old Hungarian and Georgian for ease of writing and secular differentiation.
A unicase alphabet is one with no uppercase or lowercase letters, however, there is only one case for each letter. The letters in these alphabets are usually of uniform size as well. This happens more often in Middle Eastern and Eastern European languages because these alphabets contain complicated symbols and contain many accents. The idea is that a unicase alphabet is easier to learn and easier to write.
Some languages have developed a unicase format simply for convenience. The Tamil alphabet, for example, contains over 468 symbols. These symbols denote consonants, consonant combinations, vowels, and vowel-consonant combinations. Adding uppercase and lowercase to this alphabet would only increase it to over 1,000 symbols, generally making it much harder to learn.
Practicality may also dictate the need for unicase in Arabic and Hebrew. In each of these languages, the letter symbols consist of a series of rings and different types of accents. Often, if the loops and accents aren’t placed perfectly, the symbol becomes a different letter. If students had to learn a different symbol for each capital letter, learning the language could become extremely confusing.
The letters in Arabic and Hebrew also each have their own specific meaning. A single letter could in some cases represent a word, making these alphabets extremely fluid. In English, a letter generally has no meaning unless it is paired with other letters. The only exceptions to this rule are “a” and “I”. “A” is an article that does not have a significant, concrete meaning. “I” is a pronoun that has a lot of existential meaning, but no real meaning without words and context. The letters in the alphabets above can send a message by themselves, so adding cases to these alphabets could break the structure of the entire language.
Some languages, like Old Hungarian, contain only one case because it’s easier to write the letters that way. Old Hungarian unicase closely resembles Celtic runes, with each letter looking a bit like bent twigs. These letters were often carved in wood or stone. It was simpler, and generally more visually pleasing, to carve all the letters in unicase.
The Georgian alphabet actually started with two cases, one upper and one lower, and later simplified to unicase for practical purposes. The original sacred alphabet, used for ecclesiastical writing, contained two cases. A unicase secular alphabet was developed to differentiate secular works from sacred texts. Today the secular alphabet is used more often than the ecclesiastical alphabet.
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