From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Thu Dec 28 2006 - 22:31:53 CST
Michael Everson wrote:
> Sinhala experts (from Sri Lanka) said they did not know them, and the
> evidence we had was insifficient to warrant encoding them. I would be
> delighted to give my dream form and propose to encode them... but have
> never found more evidence than one plate and the description at §130 in
> Gunasekara 1891. He says:
> "The Sinhalese had symbols of its own to present the different numerals,
> which were in use until the betinning of the present [19th] century.
> Arabic figures are now univerally used. For the benefit of the student
> the old symbols are given in the plate opposite. (No. III)."
> On that plate are unique symbols for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20,
> 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 (looks like a ligature of 60 and 10), 80, 90, 100, 1000.
Michael, have you checked to see if there is any mention of these numbers in Georges
Ifrah's _The Universal History of Numbers_? I have found this book quite useful in terms
of information on historical numeric systems. Of course, Ifrah might simply repeat
information from Gunasekara...
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC john@tiro.ca Marie Antoinette was a woman whose core values were chocolate, sex, love, nature and Japanese ceramics. Frankly, there are worse principles of government than that. - Karen Burshtein
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