> This passage describes an *internal process* only. This has nothing to > do with the Unicode Consortium or Technical Committee preferring > lowercase forms over uppercase for user-visible operations, and it > definitely does *not* claim that mapping to lowercase is more consistent > or "better" than mapping to uppercase. There is no explanation given > for the phrase "a single lowercase letter where possible" to explain why > lowercase was selected. It appears to be an arbitrary choice.
The choice of whether to use upper or lower for folding was originally somewhat arbitrary; either could have been chosen.* However, the choice of lowercase was made for folding operations, and was encapsulated into the case folding mappings in the UCD. This does not indicate an fundamental sort of 'preference' by the consortium for either case in general text processing, but for a folding operation one must chose, and the choice needs to be stable. *The main reason for choosing lowercase was that there are more characters with lowercase-only than uppercase-only. These characters, mostly IPA, are lowercase in form but have no corresponding uppercase equivalent. Occasionally corresponding uppercase characters are added -- when the character is added to the orthography of some language and ceases to be only IPA (when this happens, it is typically for an African language), and an uppercase is required. Mark
