Re: orthographic borrowings

Jonathan Chang wrote:

> Yes I read that in a book on ethnomathematics. But what I mean to say is
> the Hindu idea influenced the Chinese & Arabs, then Arabs transmitted the
> idea further to "the West" (the current number system used almost worldwide
> now is accurately called "Hindu-Arabic").
With the interesting result that the worldwide numbers are called "Arabic",
the numbers used with Arabic are called "Indian", and the numbers traditionally
used with Indic scripts have no particular label!

Unicode rationalized the terminology a bit, speaking of "European numerals",
"Indic-Arabic numerals" (two flavors, standard and Eastern), and then
Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, ..., Tibetan numerals.

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