I think the reason they specify English or French characters is that Latin doesn't really specify what is allowed. French can use á or à or ç. Latin was generally written without diacritical marks by Romans with the occasional exception of the apex which looks similar to acute accents to me. If we're talking about modern Latin writings, things like macrons (a horizontal line above like ā) and even breves have been used (like ă). Would we be talking about the classical Latin alphabet which is missing the letters J, U, and W?

If we're talking about "Latin characters" in a colloquial sense, do we allow things like ñ? That's valid in the Spanish version of the latin alphabet, but not in standard English or French. French does use the accent tréma (¨) on certain letters, but not all letters. What about the German ẞ or Norwegian Ø? Are those latin characters? The Romanian ș? The Welsh Ŵ? The Czech Ď? The Polish Ł? The Maltese Ħ?

Specifying English and French is meant to add specificity to what is allowed. While so many languages use "Latin characters", they're often a bit different. I don't look at something in German and think "what on earth are those letters", but I might think "what is that ẞ and what are those dots?"

I'm not arguing that the law should specify how companies name themselves. I'm just saying that specifying English and French makes sense because specifying "Latin characters" leaves a lot to be desired. Do they mean to exclude "J"? Do they mean to exclude "ç"? Do they mean to include "Ł"? You might think that it's obvious what the latin characters are: they're clearly the set of characters that a native English or French speaker thinks is normal, right? As a native-English speaker, the Spanish "ñ" or the French "ç" seem familiar - I've seen them a bunch in my life and I know what they do. The Polish "Ł"? That's unfamiliar to me. What does the line do? I don't know.

They wanted to specify what was allowed and what wasn't allowed and "Latin characters" doesn't narrow it down enough - or potentially narrows it down too much by excluding many English and French words and names.

"Latin characters" is short-hand for "characters from the Latin script", which is not the same as the Roman alphabet. Your post reads a bit muddled because you seem to be under the impression that nothing is standardised and precisely defined and one couldn't simply look up whether a characters is Latin script or not. (All the examples you showed are.)

> What does the line do?

Name is "stroke", function is the same as for other (diacritic) marks, it indicates a variant from the base form. http://enwp.org/diacritic

If you're being pedantic, modern English uses Latin script and Arabic numerals in addition to a variety of special characters. English and French use alphabets which are derived from the Latin alphabet. The Wiki pages on the subject are quite good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script

> If you're being pedantic, modern English uses ... Arabic numerals...

Well, if you want to be super pedantic:

Arabic numerals look like this:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

٩ ٨ ٧ ٦ ٥ ٤ ٣ ٢ ١ ٠

and appear little-endian when reading.

The ones we use come from devanagari (brahmic) alphabets and look generally like this (though they arrived in Europe via islamic scholarship, hence the common name in some languages)

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९

I am always looking to be more pedantic so I appreciate this

I assume it means you can only use the sunset of Latin characters used in French and English, e.g. 'ç' is acceptable but 'ñ' isn't.

English and French language characters are a specific subset of Latin characters.