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. Instead, one finds such
curiosities as a passionate love of the "footless L" (I have seen a sign,
advertising "cow juice" that said MIIK, sans serif), a passion for the
Turkish dotted-capital I, and embedded capital K's ("WorKing"), long
before embedded capitals (in non-Irish company names, etc. :) ) became
fashionable. Of course, small capitals typically are freely intermixed
with lower case.
For this to become so common, there must have been a quite-widespread
significant flaw in teaching; I don't blame the teachers.
It seems conceivable that the number of distinct letter shapes (incuding
typeface-specific variants, such as two basic "a"s) might overwhelm
youngsters, and they never really recover. Nevertheless, I doubt this.
Anyhow: My query is whether similar variations happen in other writing
systems that have more than one case. By extension, are there misuses of
this variety in "caseless" scripts? Are Arabic and Hebrew sometimes
wrongly "pointed"?
(Another possibility: IIrc, Georgian has two different forms, Mkhreduli
and Asomtavruli; would those sometimes become intermixed?
Just had a Bad Thought: Intermix Trad. and Simplified Chinese! Heavens...)
[Fwiw, I think I witnessed a "street person" who boarded the wrong bus
because, perhaps, he couldn't even read numerals, much less
destination-sign text. He appeared to have normal vision.]
My regards to all,
--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
Opera 7.5 (Build 3778), using M2