Also, English assignment of ordinal numbers is off by one. This breaks lots of calculations. If we start with 0th place, then in a series of competitions, the sum of your placements is the number of people who beat you.
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Nice story, but almost certainly untrue. It's pretty conclusively contradicted by early Indian manuscripts originating what the west calls "Arabic" numerals (the west got it from the Arabs, but they in turn got it from India).
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Here, take the Bakhshali manuscript. http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2018-06 … It's early, written in Śāradā script (which is Left->Right), and has the digits (see images in article) in what we would consider "normal" (Big Endian) decimal digit order.
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zero angel is my favorite gundam
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@rygorous said this is inaccurate: those numbers were originally from LTR languages and it's quite obvious *why* if you think about it a bit: when you write numbers the way we do in an RTL language, you have to predict how much space you'll need -
I don't buy this particular argument. What forces you to write the numbers from most significant digit to least? You could just as well write from least to most.
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No. We don't write numbers backwards - we write them exactly how it makes the most sense. Precision needed only when the previous information bit is not enough. -How much? -76 thousa... -Fcuk off! -How much? -1 cents and 20 and 3 dollars and 40 and 500 and 6000 and 70000
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To interpret the significance of the leading digit of the number then, you need to count the number of digits first, as a number beginning in 1 could be ten or a billion. Whereas if we reverse the digits, the meaning of the leading digit is always exactly known.
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I re-read this Tweet like 5 times and I'm still kinda confused. But if it helps anybody, we write Arabic numbers left to write, even with Arabic letters being written right to left. So 19 in English is still ١٩ in Arabic. Unless this Tweet is about something else and I'm dumb.
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he's saying that the numbering order makes more sense in a RTL language - starting from the singles (9), moving to the tens (1) etc. Except yeah, I don't think that's actually true - it's not like anyone (Arab or otherwise) actually parses the 9 separately and before the 10...)
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