One problem is that there are only so many punctuation characters in ASCII, and in addition to that, there are only so many English words that are general enough to be used as keywords. Take Clojure as an example: assoc, do, and even let are basically false cognates according to the OP, since they differ from the same keywords in Common Lisp and Scheme, both a lot (assoc and do) and a little (let). But if Rich Hickey had picked other words, just for the sake of making it easier on beginners, I think the language would have suffered. This is just another example of optimizing for the experience of beginners, rather than for the experience of programmers who have taken the time to become proficient with the language.
> One problem is that there are only so many punctuation characters in ASCII
You can use sequences of punctuation characters, e.g. <:= and =:> for brackets, or =>> for an operator, or :*; for a separator. Or use punctuation characters not in ASCII: there's hundreds of them in the symbols blocks of Unicode.
This is certainly true, but I don't think it offers much practically. I would prefer to use a language that re-used or recycled keywords made up of letter than use a soup of punctuation just for the sake of being different.
