> The second one is old; the first one I added using the second one as > example. But I wonder what the rationale for this is. Maybe for hindi > one could make some kind of cultural argument, but for russian this > seems entirely arbitrary.
Perhaps it is, but we have actual Russians who think it's a good idea. I recall questioning that point some years ago, and Oleg replied that they'd done that intentionally because (a) technical Russian uses a lot of English words, and (b) it's easy to tell which is which thanks to the disjoint letter sets.
Yes, you are right.
Whether the same is true for Hindi, I have no idea.
> Moreover, AFAIK, the following other languages do not use Latin-based > alphabets:
> arabic arabic \ > greek greek \ > nepali nepali \ > tamil tamil \
Hmm. I think all of those entries are ones that got added by me while absorbing post-2007 Snowball updates, and I confess that I did not think about this point. Maybe these should be changed.
