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

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

Surely the numbers aren't read left to right, they're just read low-to-high? I can't see any particular reason that numbers need to have their most significant dits on the left.

[venta.livejournal.com]

If, when you read them out loud, you read out the MSB first then it makes sense for the MSB->LSB direction to be the same as the direction in which you read regular text.

Makes sense to me, anyway.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

But, as you say, in Arabic it's five-and-twenty anyway.

Also, you can't actually read digits out by reading out in order unless you divorce them from their place values - "four one two nine" rather than "four thousand, one hundred, and twenty nine" - because you need to read ahead to know that it's thousands, or twenty instead of two.

I think the endian pattern of our numbers is just as arbitrary as the direction in which we read.

[venta.livejournal.com]

For two digit numbers, yes. For three you're stuffed.

Also, you can't actually read digits out by reading out in order unless you divorce them from their place values - "four one two nine" rather than "four thousand, one hundred, and twenty nine" - because you need to read ahead to know that it's thousands, or twenty instead of two.

Yes, I guess that's something I hadn't really thought about. I effectively have to read a number twice, once to get the magnitude and once to actually say it.

You could argue that in Rrabic by the time you've read the from the LSB to the MSB (in the usual direction of reading) you're ready to say it :)