TITLE: Have there been efforts to introduce non Greek or Latin alphabets into mathematics?
QUESTION [68 upvotes]: As a physics student, often I find when doing blackboard problems, the lecturer will struggle to find a good variable name for a variable e.g. "Oh, I cannot use B for this matrix, that's the magnetic field". 
Even ignoring the many letters used for common physical concepts, it seems most of the usual Greek and Latin letters already have connotations that would make their usage for other purposes potentially confusing, for instance one would associate $p$ and $q$ with integer arguments, $i,j,k$ with indices or quaternians, $\delta$ and $\varepsilon$ with small values, $w$ with complex numbers and $A$ and $B$ with matrices, and so forth.
It then seems strange to me that there's been no effort to introduce additional alphabets into mathematics, two obvious ones, for their visual clarity, would be Norse runes or Japanese katakana.
The only example I can think of offhand of a non Greek or Latin character that has mainstream acceptance in mathematics would be the Hebrew character aleph ($\aleph$), though perhaps there are more.
My question then, is have there been any strong mainstream efforts, perhaps through using them in books, or from directly advocating them in lectures or articles, to introduce characters from other alphabets into mathematics? If there have been, why have they failed, and if there haven't been, why is it generally seen as unnecessary?
Thank you, and sorry if this isn't an appropriate question for math.stackexchange.com, reading the FAQ made it appear as if questions of this type were right on the borderline of acceptability.

REPLY [7 votes]: have there been any strong mainstream efforts, perhaps through using them in books, or from directly advocating them in lectures or articles, to introduce characters from other alphabets into mathematics? 

I had fun introducing some in my PhD thesis:

This has nothing to do with notation, but forced me to redner several non-Latin, non-Greek alphabets. I strived to obtain all the quotes in their original language (even when rendering them would have been quite tricky); at the moment I count: English, Italian, French, Spanish, Japanese, ancient Hebrew, German, Russian. Some are still missing, but at some point I will add Egyptian (plus, a Japanese anonymous quote, as well as one from Ueshiba O Sensei's writings, is still reported in English). I'm working on that.
In Prop. 4.2.7 the "tower of $f$" symbol is the \rook command, the symbol that denotes the rook in the game of chess.
page 107, I "adoptt an extremely compact notation, referring to a (donné de) recollement with the [...] letter "rae" of the Georgian
alphabet.
footnote 4, page 113: The symbol [...] (pron. "glue") recalls the alchemical token describing the process of amalgamation between two or more elements (one of which is often mercury): although amalgamation is not recognized as a proper stage of the "Magnum Opus", several sources testify that it belongs to the alchemical tradition.
footnote 4, page 150: The symbol [...] (pron. retort) recalls the alchemical token for an alembic; here the term hints at the double meaning of the word retort.
Notation 7.1.1. The set of slicings is denoted 切(C), as the Japanese verb 切る (“kiru”, to cut) is formed from the radical 切 (the same of katana).
The masonic "pigpen cipher" is used, but only as a graphical substitute for the "pullback" or "pushout" or "pullback and pushout" symbols.

Also, but the idea is not mine, the Yoneda embedding appears here as the letter "yo" in hiragana alphabet.
I have a list of desiderata of alphabets or notation I would like to include: if I manage to do Mathematics for a sufficiently long time, I'll try to include all of them in a meaningful way.

Arabic
Devanagari
Quenya
Cuneiform alphabet
Phoenician
Tamil
Nsibidi script (still looking for a "grammar" for that); I also suspect there's still no way to employ the ideograms as a ready-to-use font. This means I have to write it. Not scared of that, but I need some time.
Inuktitut
Obviously, Ithkuil (but I foresee some difficulties).
Obviously, the imaginary alphabet invented by L. Serafini for the Codex Seraphinianus
I'd like to find a way to meaningfully employ the "palatal click" as an unary operator on symbols, so natural that it becomes usual and famous.
How could I even forget mentioning musical alphabet? "Clefs" for example.