Re: The English/French counting system (WAS: number systems fromconlangs)

On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 08:57:35AM -0400, Tristan McLeay wrote:
> *I'm aware some (primarily American I believe) dialects skip the 'and' in
> all cases at least nowadays.
It depends on context.  The man on the American street generally says the "and"
after "hundred", but in matters of technical or legal precision,
"and" is reserved for the decimal point (this is the case, for instance,
in the written-out currency amounts on checks).

> Numbers in Quenya are written in the opposite direction. I've always
> considered our numbers to be backwards, going from small to large seems to
> better agree with my sense of aesthetics or something.
It makes more sense mathematically, too, and in Arabic the numbers do
proceed from small to large - which means that a number in Arabic text
looks "right" to those of us used to the way we write them even though
the surrounding text is "backwards".

-Mark

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