She stares at the screen and the little words of green

[venta]

Yesterday I was writing here about someone reading text on a phone. The text appeared in Arabic, I originally wrote, but the numbers appeared in Roman numerals.

No, wait. I, II ? I don't mean Roman numerals. What's the word for ordinary, normal numerals? They're...

Oh yeah, they're Arabic numerals. I remember.

I mentioned this last night to someone who's just got back from a holiday in Beirut[*]. Aha, she said! But people writing in Arabic don't use those numerals. At least, not in the Lebanon. During a very, very long traffic jam she matched the Arabic numbers (by which I mean the numerals as used in England) on the car licence plates with the Arabic-looking squiggles on the other half of each car's licence plate, and deduced that they use a complete different set of symbols to represent numbers.

Apparently it all depends whether you're using Eastern or Western Arabic numerals, and whether you are East or West of Egypt.

Today, I have learned something.

The corollary to this is that our number system is based on the Hindu-Arabic number system. Like theirs, the number is read left-to-right.

So, if you're reading Arabic text, the text flows right-to-left... until you get to a number. Then it briegly switches to left-to-right. Mmmm.... bi-directional text. Just for those who thought that text layout was just too easy and needed a bit more of a challenge.

Interestingly (by which I mean "according to Wikipedia"), for small numbers they are more-or-less read in the same direction as ordinary text: when reading 25 out loud in Arabic, you effectively read "five and twenty". Sadly, 125 is "one hundred and five and twenty", which seems as wilfully perverse as Americans and their middle-endian dates.

[*] She's a travel journalist. She does things like that.

Comments

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

I had an interesting conversation about Arabic numbering recently. We have someone's notes referring to an Arabic manuscript. The manuscript is in book form, and is read from what we would call the back of the book. In western books, the terminology for referring to pages is to use the number of the leaf, followed by 'recto' (the front) or 'verso' (the back). But, in a book read from right-to-left (back to front) - which is the recto and which is the verso?!

There's probably a standard, but me and our archivist don't know it, and we don't know if the person writing the notes knew it...

[shui-long.livejournal.com]

All Arabic books are put together from back to front in Western eyes; it's not unusual to get company brochures, accounts etc printed with an English version starting from the "front" and an Arabic version starting from the "back" to reflect both cultures. I would have thought it was reasonably clear that "recto" is the first page you read and "verso" the other side of that page.

Though "recto" and "verso" are really a carry-over from the days of animal parchment, which often does have a smooth "good" side and a not-so-smooth other side.

[shui-long.livejournal.com]

I must admit I was only thinking about hard-copy material - you're quite right about the complications for electronic documents.
I notice that Arabic localisations of MS Word appear to flip graphics (such as logos) about their vertical axis, presumably so that anything normally viewed left-to-right is then viewed right-to-left; does that mean that the graphic symbols for a DVD control might also be flipped, and >> would become << ...!

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

I'd use "recto" for the titlepage and odd numbered pages, "verso" for the back of the titlepage and even numbered pages. You always read the recto before the verso. So Arabic would be the opposite way round to English.

I'll check with an expert when the ex-librarian next comes in.