[bhaak]

> As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it.

You mix the whole development line of that Latin alphabet into one dismissive argument. I see lots of difference between the Phoenician and the Latin alphabet and FWIW, the Latin alphabet is quite versatile as its wide application shows.

It wonder what do you consider mediocre about them?

> Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler if the glyphs expressed some of the symmetries of the number system. Alas.

I don't think learning arithmetic would be much simpler with other numerals. Even the Romans could do it and they had one of the worst possible numerical systems.

I find our numerals quite fine. My daughter was recognizing numbers before she turned 2. There is some mnemonic to the first four (1 line, 2 corners on the left, 3 corners on the left, 4 corners overall) and most are quite distinct from our Latin letters. 6 and 9 are annoyingly symmetrical of each other, though.

[jacobolus]

Writing a less dismissive / more serious argument about the Latin alphabet would take a few hundred pages. You’re right though, I’m not a speaker of (or expert in) ancient Phoenician, perhaps their alphabet was a bit better structured for that language (it looks pretty ad hoc though). I can primarily speak to the Latin alphabet’s irregularity and mediocrity for representing modern English/Spanish/etc., though it doesn’t seem to have been much better for Greek or Latin. Obviously it works well enough to be the practical anchor for written culture, and I can certainly imagine worse systems (little Egyptian-style pictographs for letters for example). But it’s hardly elegant or systematic. The ordering of the letters is also pretty much arbitrary, and has nothing to do with the separation between consonants and vowels, or the relationship between particular sounds.

For an example of a better designed alphabet, check out Korean Hangul.

* * *

The numerals 1, 2, 3 come from just writing strokes, like tally marks, which over time became connected in handwriting. The other numbers were mostly fairly arbitrary symbols, which morphed slowly over time with occasional replacements and swaps. Otherwise, the symbols have absolutely nothing to do with the numbers they represent or with the base ten number system. Overall, I’d say numbers 0 and 1 are pretty effective. The rest are a huge waste of potential.

Same story for the words/names used to represent the numbers. They are made of arbitrary sounds in arbitrary numbers of syllables, reveal nothing about the theoretical properties of the numbers, some of them are hard to say or easy to mistake, etc. Especially for numbers beyond ten, the names are irregular and confusing. This has a real practical impact. Counting is notably easier for Chinese speaking children than for English speakers.

> I don't think learning arithmetic would be much simpler with other numerals. Even the Romans could do it and they had one of the worst possible numerical systems.

In general, Romans did their arithmetic using little pebbles (“calculus”) on counting board (“abacus”), and used written symbols only for recording the output of their calculations. This made some types of computation very difficult (because using pebbles to record every step gets cumbersome), which helps explain why science has taken off in the past 500 years in Europe after we started developing better notational conventions and using Hindu–Arabic numerals and later decimal fractions, logarithms, etc.

My son is about 2 weeks old, so I can’t tell you yet how well he learns arithmetic using a different set of numerals. Ask me again in about 10 years.