Re: Argument Structures

Leo Caesius wrote:

>     I never understood why writing proceeds from right to left, but numbers
> proceed from left to right, in the Middle East.  Is this part of the South
> Asian tradition (from whence these numbers originally came)?
Yes.  Indic digits don't look much like their Arabic and European counterparts,
but they are all written the same way: the most significant digit is on the
left.  The oldest Indic script, Brahmi, was written right to left, but
all currently used scripts are left to right like European ones.

The Unicode list has heard testimony from several Iranians that the standard
way of (hand)writing numbers is to stop at the beginning of the number,
guesstimate the amount of space that will be required for it, move that far
to the left, write the number left-to-right, and then move back to the leftmost
digit to resume writing.  We haven't heard from any native Arabic speakers
about the procedure used there.

On computers, in any event, numeric text is stored and typed most-significant-digit
first in all cases, which means that Arabic and Hebrew displays are necessarily
bidirectional, even if they don't have to handle embedded Latin text (which is
invariably the case these days).

>     For reasons unknown to me, the terms "South Asia" and "East Asia" have
> caught on in the Western Media (when was the last time you heard anyone say
> "the Far East" or "the Subcontinent?),
People from the subcontinent say "subcontinent" all the time.

--
Anyway, governments are marginal     || John Cowan <jcowan@...>
outside totalitarian states, though  || http://www.reutershealth.com
attention is always focused on them  || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
to direct it away from what matters. \\ -- Noam Chomsky (1995)