I've put the passage from Wright regarding the "polarity" of numbers at
http://www.enteract.com/~greyno/lang/arabic/wright/text/p259.txt
See paragraph 327.
Caveat: I've used my own system of transliteration - see xlit.txt in the
same directory. Eventually I'll translate it into a standard encoding.
Wright is the standard reference grammar, still easily available:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521094550/o/qid=941640216/sr=2-3/002
-8446384-6945824
or you can probably get it at the Oxford Press website.
Last week I sought info on other languages with similar number polarity, and
it turns out I had an example right under my nose all along. Apparently
classical Sinhalese does the same thing in a left-to-right context. See
http://www.datalogics.com/xml/xsl/wg/lextype.htm#sinhalese
But notice that the (English) author makes the same culturally-based
assumption we all tend to make, which is that the "correct" polarity is most
significant digit first, so he interprets the numbers as "right-to-left".
He may be right; I don't speak or read Sinhalese, so I don't know how such
numbers would have been read aloud. But I'll bet it was LSD first, so
left-to-right is the proper interpretation. I sent a query to a friend who
is from Sri Lanka but haven't heard back yet; can anybody here shed some
light?
Gregg Reynolds
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:54 EDT