Aye, that's one of the things in capitalization's pro-column (it's what I meant with "searching" in there).
Of course there's a complex interaction between letter and punctuation design there - if we didn't use capital letters, our full stop marks might be bigger instead. And perhaps that would be more elegant than having two versions of every letter. Now, that's of course a "what if ..." and not a practical argument that should affect your blog post today. (Nor is it an exhaustive argument, emphasized sentence beginnings aren't the same as emphasized sentence ends.)
But it's super-interesting that you bring up periods, because they're a great example of rules vs. the reality of written communication. The rules require ending sentences in periods, but a vast number of people start dropping them when the medium has an implicit full stop, like chats (IRC, SMS, ...) do (line/message end = full stop). Instead the period becomes repurposed as a sort of "aggression mark": http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115726/period-our-simples...
Of course there's a complex interaction between letter and punctuation design there - if we didn't use capital letters, our full stop marks might be bigger instead. And perhaps that would be more elegant than having two versions of every letter. Now, that's of course a "what if ..." and not a practical argument that should affect your blog post today. (Nor is it an exhaustive argument, emphasized sentence beginnings aren't the same as emphasized sentence ends.)
But it's super-interesting that you bring up periods, because they're a great example of rules vs. the reality of written communication. The rules require ending sentences in periods, but a vast number of people start dropping them when the medium has an implicit full stop, like chats (IRC, SMS, ...) do (line/message end = full stop). Instead the period becomes repurposed as a sort of "aggression mark": http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115726/period-our-simples...