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

[mrlloyd.livejournal.com]

The Dutch would say 'one hundred five and twenty' or for that matter, 'nine hundred nine and ninety'.

But then they'd also describe a time as five minutes after thirty minutes before four. (twenty five to four).

My view is that this all puts the important information too late, and requires more thinking than is necessary...

[venta.livejournal.com]

It doesn't mean that unless you're being told a two digit number! Which yes, is good, but it's all over the shop for anything larger.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

German's this way too.

The sentence structure in German bugs me - piling all the verbs up at the end like that!

[(Anonymous)]

"all the verbs at the end like that piling up", shirley?

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

My memory of GCSE German is very hazy, but maybe: All the verbs piling like that at the end up.