At 4:15 PM -0500 6/4/01, Ayers, Mike wrote:
> I have used Arabic numerals all my life without once thinking that I
>was writing Arabic.
Really? I myself have been writing European numerals using the
Arabic-Indic place-value system. However, the glyphs like 0 and 1
that represent numbers are European characters. Classically, Arabic
uses a different set of glyphs to represent these same digits.
They're still used in Egypt, though most of the rest of the
Arabic-speaking world has adopted European digit glyphs.
Today's European digits like 0, 1, 2, and 3 are actually closer to
the original Hindu glyphs from 1000 years ago than to true Arabic
numerals. Both Arabic and European digits derive from the original
sources in India. however, the Arabic numerals had to shift a lot
more to make for convenient writing in the right-to-left script
system employed in Arabic than in the left-to-right printed system
used in the West in the Middle Ages.
ObUnicode: Unicode characters 0x0660 through 0x0669 cover the real
Arabic digits used in Egypt today. A couple of them like the
character for 9 look the same, but most of them would be
unrecognizable to a non-Arabic speaker.
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