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I appreciate the Western convention, but a significant fraction of the world uses pictogram-like written languages (e.g. Chinese). Using pictograms to represen

I appreciate the Western convention, but a significant fraction of the world uses pictogram-like written languages (e.g. Chinese). Using pictograms to represent words or concepts isn't that far-fetched.

codethief 6y ago
Yes, and there is a reason why Chinese is so hard to learn: There are so many characters that learning them takes years.
- alexvoda 6y ago
  Chinese being difficult to learn has nothing to do with the current discussion. And the wealth of symbols of chinese script is beneficial to mathematical notation where names are forced to be single character. They are descriptive and diverse which cannot be said about latin or greek letters. But they are foreign to westerners. The real issue is forcing names to be of single character lenght.
  - codethief 6y ago
    > Chinese being difficult to learn has nothing to do with the current discussion. It has everything to do with the current discussion. GP was suggesting that a "pictogram-like written language […] isn't that far-fetched". And I was countering that argument by saying that a large alphabet (a large set of pictograms) is hard to learn or at least takes a lot time, as can be seen from trying to learn Chinese. That time is much better spent wrapping one's head around the math itself.
    - alexvoda 6y ago
      > And I was countering that argument by saying that a large alphabet (a large set of pictograms) is hard to learn or at least takes a lot time, as can be seen from trying to learn Chinese or oher asian scripts. And my counter to that is that the same way you do not learn greek in order to use some greek characters in math, the same way you do not learn chinese in order to use some chinese characters in math. There are cases where "Δ" read as "delta" makes perfect sense for the delta between two values. Whereas "η" read as "eta" is not a obvious synonym for efficiency, or for the coefficient of viscosity, or for the metric tensor in Quantum Field Theory. And "c" read as "c" is not an obvious synonym for speed of light, or for 100, or for the space of convergent sequences. But "光" read as "Guāng"(chinese) or "hikari"(japanese) or "light"(english) might be obvious for something related to light. You do not need to learn the original pronunciation of the character to use it. Just have a 1 to 1 mapping between notation and notion. Same way Chinese and Japanese have completely incompatible pronunciations for the same characters. And even better, just use words instead of characters.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
alexvoda 6y ago
Precisely. As an analogy, the Julia programming language allows Unicode variable names. https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/variables/#man-variables https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/variables/#man-varia...

codethief 6y ago

Yes, and there is a reason why Chinese is so hard to learn: There are so many characters that learning them takes years.

alexvoda 6y ago
Chinese being difficult to learn has nothing to do with the current discussion. And the wealth of symbols of chinese script is beneficial to mathematical notation where names are forced to be single character. They are descriptive and diverse which cannot be said about latin or greek letters. But they are foreign to westerners. The real issue is forcing names to be of single character lenght.
- codethief 6y ago
  > Chinese being difficult to learn has nothing to do with the current discussion. It has everything to do with the current discussion. GP was suggesting that a "pictogram-like written language […] isn't that far-fetched". And I was countering that argument by saying that a large alphabet (a large set of pictograms) is hard to learn or at least takes a lot time, as can be seen from trying to learn Chinese. That time is much better spent wrapping one's head around the math itself.
  - alexvoda 6y ago
    > And I was countering that argument by saying that a large alphabet (a large set of pictograms) is hard to learn or at least takes a lot time, as can be seen from trying to learn Chinese or oher asian scripts. And my counter to that is that the same way you do not learn greek in order to use some greek characters in math, the same way you do not learn chinese in order to use some chinese characters in math. There are cases where "Δ" read as "delta" makes perfect sense for the delta between two values. Whereas "η" read as "eta" is not a obvious synonym for efficiency, or for the coefficient of viscosity, or for the metric tensor in Quantum Field Theory. And "c" read as "c" is not an obvious synonym for speed of light, or for 100, or for the space of convergent sequences. But "光" read as "Guāng"(chinese) or "hikari"(japanese) or "light"(english) might be obvious for something related to light. You do not need to learn the original pronunciation of the character to use it. Just have a 1 to 1 mapping between notation and notion. Same way Chinese and Japanese have completely incompatible pronunciations for the same characters. And even better, just use words instead of characters.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

alexvoda 6y ago

Precisely. As an analogy, the Julia programming language allows Unicode variable names. https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/variables/#man-variables https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/variables/#man-varia...