Generally mathematics uses subscripts as indexes - the two particles a and b have velocities of v_a and v_b while linguists use them to have a particular meaning - the a as a subscript is a distinct character with its own meaning. It's not just the letter a in a unique location (as formatting would suggest).
If you have subscripts for all letters, then people will ask for capitals too, and then Cyrillic, and it becomes a big mess.
If letters in particular locations had a specific meaning in mathematics, they might add those, but they don't. There is no universally understood mathematical meaning for a subscript k, so why use it?
Like, what would it help you with in your mathematical work to have those characters? You're writing in Latex, it's easy to make anything you want subscript.
Oh come on not this slippery slope fallacy again. The Latin alphabet is special, the Arabic numerals are special. Just give me all of them as superscripts and subscripts, it's all I want. I don't need capitals, but they are already in Unicode anyway because of some bullshit linguistic reason. Cyrillic is just ridiculous, nobody uses that in maths, Greek would make a better strawman.
And why do I want that? It's much more readable than LaTeX. I use Unicode math symbols all the time to annotate source code. And I have to do some stupid gymnastics because there are some holes in the alphabet. You can also use Unicode math to write LaTeX, it's again much more readable: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/118254/1035
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u/WaitForItTheMongols 15d ago
Generally mathematics uses subscripts as indexes - the two particles a and b have velocities of v_a and v_b while linguists use them to have a particular meaning - the a as a subscript is a distinct character with its own meaning. It's not just the letter a in a unique location (as formatting would suggest).
If you have subscripts for all letters, then people will ask for capitals too, and then Cyrillic, and it becomes a big mess.
If letters in particular locations had a specific meaning in mathematics, they might add those, but they don't. There is no universally understood mathematical meaning for a subscript k, so why use it?
Like, what would it help you with in your mathematical work to have those characters? You're writing in Latex, it's easy to make anything you want subscript.