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Why do you need a capital letter to denote the start of a sentence when you have a piece of punctuation doing the same thing right before it? And "Hey Steve, how was your day?" doesn't really contain any more information than "hey steve, how was your day?"
I don't know if there is any logical origin for why it is the way it is. I'd assume it is because it started out purely as a written cursive language and some letter combination flow together differently than others for ease of writing and over the centuries it became institutionalized (that's a wild-assed guess, though). And some of the letter pairs do have distortions of sound from how the letters are pronounced individually (but I don't recall if this is true in all cases). Such ligatures are common in many writing systems (Korean has them for all of its vowel combinations, I believe) and have equivelants in English and other Latin-based writing systems. It would be easy to imagine English having a situation where "h" and "t" combine to a new looking form when an "h" follows a "t." And as a very faint vestigial we can see such a thing when an "e" follows an "a" at the beginning of a word, such as in "Mt. Ætna." In German, if you find yourself needing to write two consecutive s'es then you don't write "ss" but rather "ß" and until about 250 years ago in English the same thing happened where that "ss" was instead written as a very tall single s that a lot of people see now and think is some weird "f" without the crossbar. As with the unnecessary short vowels in Arabic, the invention of typesetting and then later the limited real estate of typewriter keys pushed many of these oddities out of the mainstream and possibly out of the language (the cent sign is almost extinct in general usage because the earliest computer keyboards didn't have room for it).
But all languages (spoken and written) have elements that seem completely stupid and useless to people who don't use them natively. For example why does English have fewer letters than phonemes, requiring us to assign multiple phonemes to the same letter? Why does Japanese not allow (except in very rare cases) consecutive consonants but Czech allows several consecutives? Why are German nouns gendered essentially randomly but Russian nouns are gendered using very explicit rules? Why does Japanese have three different writing systems, which may be used all within a single sentence? How do so many languages get along without an equivelant of "a" and "the" while others can't go more than three words without using one of them? Why does the Russian alphabet, otherwise phonetic, contain two letters that don't actually represent specific phonemes?
Languages are quirky. That's what makes them interesting. If we were to plan them out we'd all speak the same one and there'd be five rules.
I remember a fellow linguistics student in my wife's program (from some south African country) who thought Western punctuation was the most retarded thing in the world since it essentially treats the reader (in his view) like an idiot that can't read unless every little nuance is provided explicitly (punctuation is much less necessary in fully inflected languages since they essentially self diagram).
Wow. Super-duper long winded. Just goes to show how boring Babel is since I wrote most of this while watching it.
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