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

[shui-long.livejournal.com]

Printed, or formally written, numerals in Arabic do seem to consistently use the "Arabic-Indic" forms across most of the Middle East (at least, all the bits of it I've visited or dealt with, from Algeria to Oman) apart from the variant form of 4,5 and 6 used in Iran - I didn't know those are also used in Urdu, as in my experience of Pakistan everything's in English. I can't read Arabic apart from the numerals (but I could at least check the figures in Egyptian company accounts before signing them!) Handwriting, however, varies, particularly with versions of 4 and 6...

Just about everywhere in the world now seems to use Western numerals for most purposes - increasingly even in places like China (players of Mahjongg will recognise the traditional Chinese numerals). Japan uses both Western and Chinese numerals; traditionalists seem to prefer the Chinese, even for zip codes and phone numbers on business cards.

The numerals in Thai script are now little used, except for formal documents and on coins (banknotes show both the Thai script numerals and the Western numerals). The signs outside some ancient monuments in Thailand show the admission charges in both English and Thai, with the figures in the appropriate script for each language - and only if you can read the Thai numerals do you realise that foreigners are being charged substantially more than Thais!