J 891
Posts:
154
Registered:
12/6/04
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Re: Greek Alphebet
Posted:
Nov 11, 2003 3:32 PM
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rusin@vesuvius.math.niu.edu (Dave Rusin) wrote in message news:<bon4pv$jce$1@news.math.niu.edu>...
> In article <386aaf52.0311090335.7be730d3@posting.google.com>,
> J 891 <j_891@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Even more extreme we could use Chinese and have thousands of symbols
> >available.
>
> I seem to recall an article by W. Bailey (I think), probably in the
> Tohoku Journal, in which he used a Japanese character for the name
> of a field. I cannot recall ever seeing an arabic character used
> (apart from Arabic numerals, of course), nor a Norse rune, nor any
> of the south Asian alphabets (e.g. Thai) nor the old English thorn,
> nor an accented Latin character from one of the modern European
> alphabets, though Cech (co)homology is usually indicated by the
> use of that diacritical mark (it's a "hachek" or something like that)
> on the H. The German Fraktur lettering is a font, really, not an
> alphabet, but those gylphs have been used heavily in the past,
> especially in algebraic number theory. There are zillions of other
> symbols used, some of which appear to be letters, but I don't think
> they really are -- nabla and pe come to mind. There are some ancient
> Greek letters which I don't think I have ever seen used in math
> (including qoppa or something like that; I think the letters were
> never used in post-Homeric Greek). There are of course many more
> alphabets from which one can draw; take a look at the full Unicode suite.
> And that doesn't include Klingon! (although it WAS proposed!)
Yes the Unicode site is quite fun. As well as the lists of
characters, there are explanations of Unicode in many languages so
that you can see them in use. I also noticed that Klingon was
proposed but it was rejected. Plenty of rare and unusual scripts have
been accepted such as Shavian (a phonetic script proposed by Shaw) and
Ogham (sort of Irish runes). If you are interested but have not seen
this site, go to www.unicode.org. Try the "What is Unicode?" link.
> >I have also wondered what mathematics in Greek and Russian look like.
> >Do the Greeks use Latin and Greek letters in a similar way to us Latin
> >alphabet users? How about the Russians, do they spurn their own
> >alphabet and use Latin and Greek letters?
>
> Well, research mathematics is usually communicated in one of just a few
> languages, so people whose native language is, say, Cherokee, don't usually
> write much high-level mathematics in that language -- not if they want
> their results to get much exposure. Before the (first) October revolution,
> that included Russia; the preferred language for the St Petersburg society
> was French. But during the 20th century there was quite a bit of
> research mathematics published in Russian, and indeed the text would be
> in Russian (using Cyrillic, of course) and the mathematics using exactly
> the same notation used in the west. I don't recall even seeing a point
> in a geometric diagram ever labelled with a Cyrillic character.
> (The fact that the typesetting of mathematics was done using Latin and
> Greek characters must have driven the Soviet printers crazy, but it was
> a boon to the translators into western languages, who would typically
> just cut and paste the displays. This was occasionally confusing since,
> for example, the names of the trig functions are not the same in all
> western languages.)
>
> There is not always a clear distinction between research monograph and
> graduate text, so university materials followed the same conventions.
> I am not sure whether the same is true in elementary-school texts;
> obviously the bulk of the text would be in the native language.
> If I had to write the primary-grade materials for them, I guess I would
> opt for using letters which appear identical in both alphabets, at
> least for a couple of years until the youngsters start the study of
> European languages in earnest.
My son is just beginning to learn algebra and his school book uses a,
b and c in its examples. I wonder what a Russian school book uses.
Your idea of sticking to matching letters sounds good but it would
mean that many letters were skipped which may puzzle monoglots.
> The same situation occurs in the Chinese texts I have seen.
> This helps a lot when I have to assess the courses an international
> student has taken in the past. They think I'm kidding when I say,
> "show me the book you used", but it's pretty easy to recognize what
> was in a course from the equations which appear.
> Just imagine the joys of writing mathematics in, say, Hebrew, where
> the bulk of the writing is done right-to-left but the equations are
> written left-to-right. Back in the typewriter days, that meant having
> to guess how much space would be required, jumping ahead (i.e. left),
> and proceeding to type (to the right).
How are numbers written in Hebrew? I remember seeing people writing
right to left (so presumably Hebrew or Arabic) but using our numerals
and writing them left to right. So they had to jump ahead a bit to
write the numbers.
> Please don't ask me what "typewriter" means.
We have moved far enough from maths already so I will refrain from
that.
> dave
J
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