Arabic, Brahmic scripts like Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Devanagari, Hebrew, Iberian, Georgian, Chinese, Syriac, Thai and Hangul are unicase writing systems, while modern Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Armenian are bicameral, as they have two cases for each letter, e.g. B and b, Β and β, or Բ and բ.
During the Early Middle Ages, scribes developed new letterforms for use in running text that were more legible and faster to write with an ink pen, such as Carolingian minuscule.
Originally, use of the two forms was mutually exclusive, but it became a common compromise to use both in tandem, which ultimately had additional benefits in areas such as legibility.
Occasionally, typefaces make use of unicase letterforms to achieve certain aesthetic effects; this was particularly popular in the 1960s.
Modern orthographies that lack a case distinction while using Latin characters include that used for the Saanich dialect in Canada, which uses majuscule letterforms save for a single suffix, and that used for palawa kani language in Tasmania, which uses only minuscule letterforms.