Re: Argument Structures

On 24 Aug, John Cowan wrote:

>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.
    Hebrew, like Arabic, is also written right to left, and the above
just about describes what I have to do all the time when I have
to include numbers (especially dates or ID numbers) in the reports,
summaries, etc. that I write at work!
(I don't always guess the correct amount of space either! :-P )

>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).
Well, the word processor I use  _today_  works that way; although previous
ones restricted me to typing _only_ in the right to left direction, so if I
came
to a number, I had to type the units first, then the tens, then the
hundreds,
etc.. It was a real pain, because Israeli Hebrew, like English and many
 other langs, counts numbers from the largest value to the smallest
(i.e. the units are counted last ), and typing the number from small to
large
thus seemed very unnatural.

Dan Sulani

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