[throwaway894345]

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.

[coldtea]

>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...

[throwaway894345]

> 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.

[MauranKilom]

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.

[throwaway894345]

> Except for "full alphabet", all of that applies to the English alphabet as much as it does for the Greek alphabet.

Native English-speakers are very familiar with the "English alphabet" but that's irrelevant because we're comparing English words (or phrases) with Greek symbols.

> But both of you seem to disagree on what "literate", "very familiar" and "historically" really mean.

Perhaps, but I'm using standard meanings available from any English dictionary.

> 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.

You can assign precise meaning to words or phrases as easily as you can to Greek symbols. The two approaches differ in that it's easier for (at least English-speaking) humans to remember words or phrases that relate to or approximate the precise meaning than a random Greek letter (I'm sure someone will demand evidence, but this is hardly an extraordinary claim compared to its inverse) while letters (Greek or otherwise) are more expedient to write by hand.