If you think about it in left-to-right languages reading numbers requires backtracking because you have to see how many digits there are to know if you're readi

If you think about it in left-to-right languages reading numbers requires backtracking because you have to see how many digits there are to know if you're reading units, thousands, millions, billions... Take 12,345,567 for instance, if you want to read it aloud you first have to go all the way to the end to figure out that there are three groups of numbers, so the first one is million, then thousands, then units. If you were only given a truncated version of the number it's impossible to read it aloud. So in a way the arabic represents number actually makes some sense and it could be argue that we write them backwards. Furthermore IIRC from a discussion with an arabic friend (from the middle east, not sure if it's different in NA) the most formal way of reading numbers aloud is actually backwards (or little endian I guess) compared to the way we do in english. So if I understood correctly for 1,234 you'd say "four and thirty and two hundred and a thousand" or something similar. Don't quote me on that though because I know almost nothing about the arabic language and this is from a discussion I've had many years ago.