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Your examples for difficulties with alphabetic keys includes a couple of cases I find interesting, and both of them have natural key implications.
The periodic table uses abbreviations of element names from multiple languages. So hydrogen is H - easy choice. C is carbon, no work there. S for sulfur, not hard to guess. But what about sodium and potassium? Respectively, Na is an abbreviation of Natrium, Latin for salt, and K from Kalium, the Latin name for that mineral. And then there is antimony - Sb for "Stibnum" meaning "mark" in Latin - because it would make a silvery smear of a mark on something used for testing such things.
The mixed origins of the names led to one-letter abbreviations in some cases and two-letter abbreviations in most other cases. Using the abbreviations therefore would lead to some ugly keys. Fortunately, there is ANOTHER natural key there that makes it easier - atomic number, which corresponds 1-to-1 with names. So there is a natural key anyway - just not the abbreviated name. We have to consider ourselves lucky. Dimitri Mendeleev formulated the modern periodic table but didn't insist on using the RUSSIAN names of the elements even though he could have. Back then, the world used the common Latin names because chemistry was already multi-national. Can you imagine trying to get modern countries to agree over what to call certain elements?
https://www.rigb.org/insideout/elements/periodic/index.html
But states? Holey Moley was THAT ever a mess to get started. It was over a generation ago that the USA devised the state-name abbreviations, about the time that the US Post Office switched to computer-driven character-recognition mail sorting. But there, we had no natural numeric key to use because 13 of our states were created at the same time. At least there was SOME semblance of reason in picking the abbreviations, though Alaska got screwed. AL would have worked but Alabama got that one. Alaska got AK. Leaving Arkansas and Arizona to fight. Arizona took AZ because Arkansas got AR. All sorts of 2nd-letter collisions got resolved and we have learned to live with what we got. BUT... at least with those abbreviations, you only need two bytes, which is a really nice, short "natural" key even if it was derived from unnatural selection.
So net result, Dave, is that your first two examples still use natural keys, not synthetic ones. One is text, the other is numeric.
The periodic table uses abbreviations of element names from multiple languages. So hydrogen is H - easy choice. C is carbon, no work there. S for sulfur, not hard to guess. But what about sodium and potassium? Respectively, Na is an abbreviation of Natrium, Latin for salt, and K from Kalium, the Latin name for that mineral. And then there is antimony - Sb for "Stibnum" meaning "mark" in Latin - because it would make a silvery smear of a mark on something used for testing such things.
The mixed origins of the names led to one-letter abbreviations in some cases and two-letter abbreviations in most other cases. Using the abbreviations therefore would lead to some ugly keys. Fortunately, there is ANOTHER natural key there that makes it easier - atomic number, which corresponds 1-to-1 with names. So there is a natural key anyway - just not the abbreviated name. We have to consider ourselves lucky. Dimitri Mendeleev formulated the modern periodic table but didn't insist on using the RUSSIAN names of the elements even though he could have. Back then, the world used the common Latin names because chemistry was already multi-national. Can you imagine trying to get modern countries to agree over what to call certain elements?
https://www.rigb.org/insideout/elements/periodic/index.html
But states? Holey Moley was THAT ever a mess to get started. It was over a generation ago that the USA devised the state-name abbreviations, about the time that the US Post Office switched to computer-driven character-recognition mail sorting. But there, we had no natural numeric key to use because 13 of our states were created at the same time. At least there was SOME semblance of reason in picking the abbreviations, though Alaska got screwed. AL would have worked but Alabama got that one. Alaska got AK. Leaving Arkansas and Arizona to fight. Arizona took AZ because Arkansas got AR. All sorts of 2nd-letter collisions got resolved and we have learned to live with what we got. BUT... at least with those abbreviations, you only need two bytes, which is a really nice, short "natural" key even if it was derived from unnatural selection.
So net result, Dave, is that your first two examples still use natural keys, not synthetic ones. One is text, the other is numeric.