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#notation

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HowToPhil (Phillip R)

I have had people go frothing at the mouth when I point out that a lot of #punctuation is "#silence #notation."

A #comma is a point of silence, it is shorter than the point of silence of a #period. #Ellipsis (...) is a fade to silence. #Emdash/dash is an abrupt silence. #Parenthesis invokes a point of silence before and after an aside, much the same length as a comma.

People forget that the written word is made to represent the spoken word, that includes silence and change of pitch.

? and !

*
Counting Is Hard

Hear me out. Mathematicians should adopt Futhark (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runes#Fu)

Mathematicians want new symbols like magpies want shiny things. Runes have the advantages that

1. There are not too many of them at around 24 depending on flavour.

2. Many of them correspond to a latin character in a relatively straightforward way, allowing for an additional "sort" of variables per context.

3. They can be drawn with straight lines in a way that is clear at a range of font sizes and are forgiving to those with poor handwriting (I'm looking at you, ξ)

4. They come from a dead language, so who's going to complain other than old norse specialists.

This handles many of the disadvantages of say:
Chinese characters (too many, and I know over 2000)
Hangul / Kana / etc. (multiple sensible choices for a given consonant)
Hebrew / other abjads (none that correspond to vowels)

Some problems:
1. Basically none of you know them. Consult your local tiktok fortune teller for a brief intro

2. The standard futhark order does not really correspond to latin/greek order

Edit: 3. Poor font support for Runes. They are at least assigned standard unicode codepoints in the Runic block, so this could be mitigated over time. In tex there is the "allrunes" package at least, although I have never tried it.

(This isn't a shitpost, I've brought this up at least four times this week already at MGS)

en.wikipedia.orgRunes - Wikipedia
#math#maths#notation
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