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

[glamwhorebunni.livejournal.com]

Yeah, as the cataloguer in the Bodleian Oriental Institute Library learning Arabic numerals was one of my first tasks. Which made me confused at first!

Of course, the point is that our numbering system is Arabic (and ultimately Indian) derived, just the glyphs used have changed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphs_used_with_the_Hindu-Arabic_numeral_system#Symbols is a pretty table, I've got a similar one I made myself. Of course, it's not actually as simple as it seems- the same book can switch between Eastern Arabic and Arabic versions of 4/5/6.

Of course, European glyphs are spreading, even more rapidly than English. When I was in China European glyphs were almost the norm, even in non-tourist areas.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

You can probably answer the question above about manuscript referencing conventions for Arabic books, then!