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You say I can only solfege (moving-do) in my head up to about Allegro 16ths at best Congratulations. That's more than enough for most purposes. I am not sure you need more but adapting the note names to your language basic phonemes is a very good idea. Constructing a dodecaphonic version of note names is fun too. But good luck to evangelize it. I would ...

I still see it applied for modes in chord notations, and it echoes the use of the distinction of M/m for Maximum and minimum in mathematical shorthand. It might be a kind of political correctness: all modes are created equal, they should not be typographically discriminated. None of them should have an initial uppercase when others have only lowercases, c ...

As suggested in my comment on the question, it seems to be a German key naming convention. If you look at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Moll they call it "c-Moll" (note lowercase) or "c" (note lowercase) or "Cm". In contrast: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Dur is called "C-Dur" (note uppercase) or "C" (note uppercase). In other words: c-Moll vs ...

I think it comes from the German practice as well, since German musicians were quite the standard-setters up to the 19th century. That said, even though it's implied in the 'shorthand' notation that C represents a major and c a minor chord, I prefer to use C and Cm when writing, for absolute clarity. The 'shorthand' notation, however, still pops here and ...

If you actually write out "C major" and "C minor", then there's no need to further distinguish them via capitalization; your meaning is already clear. So I agree with Raskolnikov in the comments that "C/c" is useful when you drop "major/minor" altogether. However, to make it more clear, I usually use and see used "C" (or rarely "CM") for the major and "Cm" ...