Comment by amluto
1 day ago
Is this a small typo?
> The relevant rule, W2 of UAX #9, reclassifies a digit as an ARABIC NUMBER if any of the previous strong characters in the paragraph were Arabic letters, and as a EUROPEAN NUMBER otherwise. Both render their internal digits left-to-right, which is correct: numbers everywhere on Earth are read most-significant-first.
Does the author mean most-significant-on-the-left? The statement as written is a statement about the order in which one reads or perhaps thinks the number, whereas I think the author is discussing how numbers, including collections of numbers delimited by hyphens and such, should be laid out on the page.
This is a thing I have wondered about. are arabic numbers little endian when embeded in arabic text? The text is read right to left. But the numbers are the same as we put them in our left to right text where they are big-endian(read big to small). so are numbers in original arabic little-endian? read small to large. with the interesting side effect that numbers are universal.
I think least significant first is the most natural order for written numbers (and it makes addition easier.)
I had always assumed that was what was intended with Arabic numbers, only silly Europeans made a mistake when they borrowed the positional system and forgot Arabic is written the other way. (Or perhaps intentionally avoided mirroring the digits for ease of communication?)
But the author of this article makes it sound like even in Arabic, numbers are read out loud most significant first.
Arabic itself got the number system from India, whose scripts are left-to-right
My understanding is that It Depends, but also feast your eyes on this photo I took, which was very confusing to me:
https://imgur.com/a/jL8lfZ1
That's a great example of the problem :)
I think he's talking about the rendering algorithm with regards to the stream of text. essentially saying rendering direction should follow reading convention.
on the other hand, in formal arabic, it's not unusual that numers are read in clusters from least significant to most significant (right to left). 1984 would be read : eighty four and nine hundred and a thousand. not sure if the author is aware of this
> rendering direction should follow reading convention.
What does that even mean in this context? In a strictly LTR language, sure, you read left-to-right and the glyphs are rendered left-to-right. But the whole discussion is about bidirectional text, where the text is rendered by a complex algorithm. What is the “rendering direction”?
I know just enough about some RTL languages to know that one can absolutely intersperse RTL text with, say, and English phrase, and you still read the first (leftmost in the group) English sound first and so on :)
if you write (with a pen) text with mixed arabic, numbers, english words. then somebody else gets to read it, he will read arabic from right to left, then when when he encouters a number or an english word, he will naturally jump to the first latin letter of the word and start reading left to right, then jump back to the beginning if the next arabic word and switch back to RTL. the alogorithm should copy that behaviour.
actually : four and eighty and nine hundred and a thousand
Numbers below 100 are always read from right to left even in vernacular/informal/dialectical Arabic.