Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:
>
> > Shift was devised for a particular quirk of contemporary roman,
> > cyrillic, and greek.
>
> Surely shift *exploited* the quirk. Characters vary enormously in
> their frequency, and as think I've already said, the Thai Kedmanee
> keyboard does a reasonable job of keeping the use of the shift key
> low. The Thai Pattchote keyboard does even better. (I can't speak
> for other scripts.)

No, the first typewriters didn't have lowercase letters at all. Just 26
letters, 8 to 10 digits (did they already expect you to double up 1 with
I, 0 with O?), and a handful of punctuation. No shift.

The above 3 and Javanese (which uses the feature differently) are the
only scripts with "case" that I can think of.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...