It's not some quirk. There are two common endiannesses, and the byte sort precedence of one of them matches the byte sort precedence we use for text. Since we

It's not some quirk. There are two common endiannesses, and the byte sort precedence of one of them matches the byte sort precedence we use for text. Since we represent characters as numbers, and for efficiency we have CPU instructions that treat aggregations of these numbers as larger numbers, we can get double-duty out of these instructions/circuits if the order they use is the same as the lexographic ordering of our text. I'm not saying big-endian is universally better. I'm just saying there are real-world advantages. Note there are more than two endiannesses, where the most common middle-endian variant is big-endian order of 16-bit words, but little-endian order within those 16-bit words. As for linguistic quirks, there's no obvious universal connection between writing order for text, the order digits are written, and the way numbers are pronounced, so I'm not sure what you're getting at. Arabic is written right-to-left, but they still write the most significant digit on the left. However, I've read that Arabic writers line-break numbers (when forced) by placing the most significant digits on the upper line and the least significant digits on the lower line, so it's not a clear-cut case of Arabic writing numbers in little-endian order right-to-left. I'm not sure about Arabic number pronunciation. I do know that German pronunciation is middle-endian: 256 is "two hundred six-and-fifty", despite the digit writing order being big-endian in German. I met a German guy who incorrectly swaps digits if you talk to him in English while he's doing mental math... forcing him to process English somehow also swaps digit orders in his head.