Right here is when Tevye jumps in and starts singing "tradition!" It's because ancestor and cousin scripts used the phonetic glyphs for numbers as well, and th

Right here is when Tevye jumps in and starts singing "tradition!" It's because ancestor and cousin scripts used the phonetic glyphs for numbers as well, and the ordering had to be fixed. Once Indo-Arabic numerals made it in to the character set, the need for strict ordering went away. But now that characters have numeric values again (ASCII, Unicode), they're fixed forever.