Here’s a collection of letter evolutions compiled by Martin Tiefenthaler for his talk at Tÿpo St. Gallen 2011, including one for G→g from Jost Hochuli’s Das Detail in der Typografie.
Basically, in the Latin alphabet, having both uppercase and lowercase was a recent invention - it came about in the Carolingian script, which combined Roman capitals with uncial writing for the lower case. So the lowercase letters had developed independently of the uppercase letters over a long period of time.
I thought that the bicameral invention was a product of the Renaissance--that it was the humanist scribes of that later period who put together the Carolingian minuscule and the Roman capitals.
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BTW the highly charming "g" in Urby is worth a mention here:
https://www.typemates.com/fonts/urby
Here’s a collection of letter evolutions compiled by Martin Tiefenthaler for his talk at Tÿpo St. Gallen 2011, including one for G→g from Jost Hochuli’s Das Detail in der Typografie.
Notice the 1.5 stories g...