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> However metric prefixes need to be shortened to just their first letter—and B and H were already taken, ruling out bronto and hella.


Lessons learned from milli and mega. Oops!


No problem there, SI prefixes are case sensitive. But micro, on the other hand...


Micro is a μ, so it’s fine too.


So what I'm hearing is we could've used hella and given it a greek letter


Not while using the standard Greek alphabet. There is no letter for the sound /h/; it is represented as a diacritic mark applied to the first letter of a word.


(For completeness, aspiration is not strictly restricted to the beginning of a word in classical-to-Byzantine Greek. It might be represented in one of three ways:

- At the beginning of a word, according to Byzantine convention, it is represented by an aspiration mark, discussed above. This can only occur if the word begins with a vowel, or with R. (All words beginning with R are aspirated.)

- Following a /p/, /t/, or /k/ sound, aspiration is represented by mutating the letter into an aspirated form. Unaspirated π becomes aspirated φ, τ becomes θ, κ becomes χ. By the time we're talking about Byzantine Greek, the "aspirated" letters have mostly mutated into other sounds. But for ancient Ancient Greek, they are aspirated forms.

- Doubled Rs have something special going on with them, and the Byzantines use a diacritic mark on the second R even though, obviously, it cannot occur at the beginning of a word. Again there is no contrast between "aspirated" and "unaspirated" double R; the aspiration is mandatory.

As you move into earlier stages of Greek, you lose the standardization of the alphabet; there are plenty of Greek inscriptions where the sound is represented by the glyph H.)


Thanks for this, I wasn’t expecting to learn anything about Greek today!


Maybe we could have called it ἑ, like 10 ἑb = 10 hellabits.


So just put a diacritic over the unit symbol; problem solved.


Funniest comment I’ve seen in a while.


μ is avoided in medicine for being difficult to represent in writing and in computer systems. It's also a source of confusion and error.

https://www.ismp.org/recommendations/error-prone-abbreviatio...

> Error-Prone Abbreviations, Symbols, and Dose Designations:

> µg

> Intended Meaning: Microgram Misinterpretation: Mistaken as mg Best Practice: Use mcg


In practice people seem to use “u” instead


DekaDeciFail.


Well, you don't have to use a dingle letter either. Deca is da.


Cyrillic small be (б) and Greek small chi (χ) could have been used instead.


Let's propose ñoñograms then, seems like anything goes.


Could get some cool abbreviations too, like のg and 노g.


There are obvious problems with both those prefixes.


how is B taken?


Byte, as per ISO/IEC 80000 (which includes SI in the Part 1).


Byte's not a prefix. Is it a problem for anyone when millimeters are written "mm"?


Units can be multiplied though. If N were a prefix you couldn’t distinguish Newtonmetres from N many metres

I think older prefixes are just grandfathered in


I don't know. Maybe new metric prefixes are subject to tighter requirements, while older prefixes like milli- are here to stay.


Yeah hella would have been great!




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