Re: Numbers in Qthen|gai (and in Tyl Sjok) [long]

On Monday, January 10, 2005, at 05:45 , kcasada wrote:

> Hi, my name's Krista Casada; I'm new to this list, and find it
> fascinating.
Hi, welcome - I am glad you find it fascinating.

> I had one little comment on numbers in Arabic. Someone said (sorry, I don'
> t have
> the original posting) that they seem to be written backwards relative to
> the
> rest of the text. Actually the situation's a bit more complicated. If I
> want
> to write the number 1995, for instance, the digits appear on the paper as
> 1995, and indeed appear to be in reverse order relative to the text, but
> are
> read as "thousand, nine hundred, five and ninety." So the spoken version
> is
> not exactly a reversal of the written one.
I thought it might be a little more complicated  :)

So the last two digits are OK for reading right to left, but not the first
two. It seems then that Arabic system is similar to that in older forms of
the Germanic languages, where things like "four and twenty" were once the
common form. "Five and twenty" was in fact still the norm for telling the
time in my grandparents' generation.

> Does that make sense?
Yep - I guess the Arabic system must them have started by writing the two
digit numeral from rught to left in the order they are spoken, i.e. units
followed by tens, and then just have extended this as the hundreds and
thousands got added.

> And would somebody please explain to me why we have to
> use masculine numbers with feminine nouns (and vice versa) in Arabic?
> Please, please, please??? :)
Curiouser and curiouser  :)

And how is the decimal point handled in real Arabic notation?

Ray
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