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By the way, this "natural" way of writing numbers comes unchanged from right-to-left writing system of Arabic. They naturally read 1234 starting from the lowest
by hamstergene 11y ago
By the way, this "natural" way of writing numbers comes unchanged from right-to-left writing system of Arabic. They naturally read 1234 starting from the lowest significant digit (here, '4').
Think about the irony :)
- KMag 11y agoI'm not sure about Arabic, but my understanding of Hebrew (another member of the Semitic language family) is that they still pronounce the numbers left to right, and if a line break forces digits to be split across lines, the most significant digits are put on the top line.
- hamstergene 11y agoYou got me curious. I googled and found[1] that indeed they only pronounce numbers 21-99 that way, e.g. for 31 the order of words is "one thirty", but higher order components go left to right, e.g. for 25031 the order of words is "five twenty thousand one thirty". 1. http://arabic.tripod.com/VocabNumbers.htm http://arabic.tripod.com/VocabNumbers.htm