Nicholas Bodley wrote:

> One unfortunate aspect of 20th-century US life has been the
> practical inability, or unwillingness, of countless adults
> to use letters of the proper case when doing hand "block"
> lettering.

(I am afraid that several aspects of 20th-century life are much more
unfortunate than this...)

> [...] and embedded capital K's ("WorKing"),

I wouldn't call that a "capital". It is a graphic variant of *small* K which
happens to look quite similar to the usual uppercase form. Same for dotted
capital I's, undotted small I's and all the other cases you mention.

> For this to become so common, there must have been a
> quite-widespread significant flaw in teaching; I
> don't blame the teachers.

No, simply you shouldn't expect handwritten text to have the same mechanical
invariability of typographic text. The things you describe are just normal
variations: we notice them only, because in these days of computers, we are
more used to see typographic text than handwriting.

> Anyhow: My query is whether similar variations happen in
> other writing systems that have more than one case.

I have certainly seen similar things in Greek: in handwriting, small letters
often look like small capitals, or vice versa capitals look like bigger
lowercase letters.

Moreover, I noticed that, in most hands, lowercase sigma does not have a
special form at the end of words.

> By extension, are there misuses of this variety in "caseless"
> scripts? Are Arabic and Hebrew sometimes wrongly "pointed"?

If by "wrongly pointed" you mean with wrong vowel marks, no, I think that
would be a very unlikely error. Everyday writing (specially if handwritten)
does not use vowel marks at all. An occasional vowel mark may be used when
the author assumes that a word would be unknown to the reader. But, in that
case, the eventuality of an error is really faint.

However, in Arabic handwriting it is very frequent to omit dots or other
parts of letters. Examples of things frequently omitted are: the dot over
final nûn, the two dots over final qâf, the S-shaped thingy in final kâf,
the two dots on tâ marbûta, the top dot in thâ' and (the most common one)
the two dots under final yâ'. The last three omission account as true
spelling errors, as they turn tâ marbuta, thâ' and yâ' into different
letters (hâ', tâ' and alif maqsûra, respectively), nevertheless they are
very common.

In Hebrew, I think that the medial and final form of some letters are not
always as distinct in handwriting as they are in print.

> (Another possibility: IIrc, Georgian has two different forms,
> Mkhreduli and Asomtavruli; would those sometimes become
> intermixed?

Nope: Asomtavruli is extinct! That would be like an English person who
inadvertently mixes up latin letters and runes...

> Just had a Bad Thought: Intermix Trad. and Simplified
> Chinese! Heavens...)

This is *very* common in handwriting.

Actually, it is even quite difficult to apply the traditional/simplified
distinction to handwritten text. The forms which we now call "simplified"
are actually shorthand forms which have always been used. The invention of
"simplified Chinese" basically consisted in extending to printed text these
forms previously typical of handwriting.

--
Marco