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

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

One, two, many, lots!

[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...

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I love Wikipedia humour:

As befitting their history, the digits (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) are also known as Hindu numerals or "Hindu-Arabic numerals". The reason that they are more commonly known as "Arabic numerals" in Europe and the Americas is that they were introduced to Europe in the 10th century by Arabs of North Africa, who were then using the digits from Libya to Morocco. Europeans did not know about the numerals' origins in ancient India, so they named them "Arabic numerals". Arabs, on the other hand, call the system "Hindu numerals",[5][6] referring to their origin in India. This is not to be confused with what the Arabs call the "Hindi numerals", namely the Eastern Arabic numerals [...] used in the Middle East, or any of the numerals currently used in Indian languages (e.g. Devanagari [...]).[7]

Arabic, Hindu-Arabic, Hindu, Hindi, Indian. Simples!

Relatedly, this has been doing the rounds recently, although it's far from new:

A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen To You

[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.

[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.

[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...

[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!

[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.

[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]

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

[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 :)

[skorpionuk.livejournal.com]

Cheers, I was going to post the very same story. It amused me greatly, since I work as a translator (only German to English, but that gets difficult enough!)

[fractalgeek.livejournal.com]

I used to do lots of (minor) localisation, and I tried to organise dialogs in ways that did NOT use sentences for exactly this eg: "File(s) retrieved: %1n" (where %1 is of course a postitional parameter). Anything I could fire through system text translation was good.

Arabic going "1, 2, many" is new to me

My #1 rule: Use ISO 8601 dates, not local for any date passed around as processable text. One system we did, roughly 1/3 of all bugs were local-format dates being processed incorrectly due to system and user locales being different.

Japanese? count in groups of 4 (not 3) - Easy, except that's for Japanese characters, and then do you put in the size counters? Usually in financial contexts, culture prefers western (ie Arabic, etc etc). Multiple overlapping calendar forms whose end date for a reign comes into force retrospectively.

The all-time killer though is what do display for a time where you have to take daylight savings into account.... A repeat appointment, for instance should be booked to the same slot after DST may have been applied. AAARRRGHHHH.

[(Anonymous)]

Now you've done it. Took me a while to find the reference.

"One, two, three, many, many-one,many-two,many-three,many many, many-many-one ..... many-many-many-two,mnay-many-many-three.LOTS"

Troll method of counting (where many is a number).

"Men at Arms" (Pratchett, publ. Corgi 1998) p. 132.

W.

[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!

[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.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

In China (and Japan?) numbers are grouped in 2 not 3 digits. In India the first grouping is 3 thereafter 2 e.g.

1
10
100
1,000
10,000
1,00,000
10,00,000
1,00,00,000

[(Anonymous)]

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

[chrisvenus]

I believe he originally did that (or something very similar) in one of diggers, truckers or wings, possibly for how frogs in trees count. I am sure it was somewhere before men at arms anyway.

But cor, that was a long time ago, that book... :)

[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.

[venta.livejournal.com]

daylight savings

The worst example of failure-to-handle this I've seen in recent times is Skype. I happened to be chatting to someone online (IM, not VoiP) when the clocks went back last autumn.

Skype re-set its internal clock, and for the next hour the conversation got interleaved with the previous hour's conversation. Deeply horrible.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

[wince]

[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 << ...!

[thefon.livejournal.com]

Chinese numbers are complicated
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals

I've seen them grouped in 4 digits (but not 2), because they have single words for 10,000 (万) and 100,000,000 (亿). So the population of China is only 14 of those.

They have yet a third set of numerals, that are even more difficult to write. These are used in financial documents, to make them hard to forge.

So these days, China mostly uses arabic numbers like the rest of the world.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

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