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0 pointsthrowaway8943455y ago0 comments

He didn't say "english letters", he said "english" which is a language. The implication is that we should use conventions (including potentially whole words) that are familiar to the English-literate world and not Greek glyphs.

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coldtea5y ago

>The implication is that we should use conventions (including potentially whole words) that are familiar to the English-literate world and not Greek glyphs.

The "english-literate" world (emphasis on literate) is, or historically has been, very familiar with Greek glyphs.

And that's just for humanities.

The mathematic and physics -literate world, doubly so. Everybody uses pi, theta, sigma (e.g. the summation formula) etc symbols...

throwaway894345OP5y ago

> The "english-literate" world (emphasis on literate) is, or historically has been, very familiar with Greek glyphs.

I would be shocked if even 1% of native English speakers could list the full Greek alphabet much less have a comprehensive familiarity with what each letter means across all branches of mathematics. I would be shocked if even 5% of native English speakers could tell you what theta generally means in geometry, much less all its other meanings.

MauranKilom5y ago

Except for "full alphabet", all of that applies to the English alphabet as much as it does for the Greek alphabet. But both of you seem to disagree on what "literate", "very familiar" and "historically" really mean. Which is fine, language is not made to be precise - luckily we can use precise symbols where precise meaning matters, not English phrases. For example in math and physics.

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