Lowercase comes from the printers' type cases. There were two, one above the other. The Capitals and Numbers were in the upper case and the non capitals were in the lower case. Then along came mechanical typesetting and the two cases were combined. The lowercase on the left and the uppercase on the right.
Ligature
is a set of characters "joined" together. Namely fi, fl,ffi. and ffl. this now helps with kerning
