Something’s been bugging me. In the days after the attack, I heard a report that someone had been arrested in ( I believe ) Canada, with what appeared to be codes scrawled on a piece of paper sewn inside his pants. The reporter went on to describe these codes as “sets of English and Arabic numbers”
Now, I thought that the numbers we use here in the States ARE Arabic numbers. Is there any such thing as an English number? Does anyone know what the reporter could have possibly meant?
What has been troubling me about it is the possibility the reporter’s ignorance was willful, motivated by an unwillingness to admit there is ANYTHING shared by our cultures.
Our numerals were derived originally from India, picked up by Arab traders, and the system made its way to Europe. I learned them as Hindu-Arabic. bup is right, there are alternate characters for the digits used in some Arab areas. 8, for instance, looks like ^. I’ve seen these used on clock faces and a few other places, but I’m not sure whether you’d use them when writing longer numbers like 7,094,886,231,530.8923505661.
bacobit, can you give us a website, or was this just a broadcast report? I’d like to share this if it’s available online.
Note that “four” is English and “cuatro” is Spanish. (I don’t know any Arabic.)
So the report could be accurate assuming someone was actually writing down numbers as words rather than numerals. And that I strongly doubt. So the report is probably wrong or misleading.
There are numerals for the whole numbers below ten (e.g. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0). In most of the world, the so-called “Arabic” numbers are used.
But in Arabic-speaking countries (and India, too), there is a different set in use, as dqa explains. FWIW, in the “Semitic” numbers (my coining) that dqa mentions, “5” is written as “o” - are we on the same page, dqa?
The quandary for the reporter is this: what are the “Semitic” numerals properly called? Is there a proper term for these numerals in English? Can’t well call them “Arabic” numerals, now can you? Marking them as “English” and “Arabic” numerals was probably a copy-editor’s compromise, figuring that most people would know what the writer meant.
>> I though we had standardised on one billion = one thousand million to fit in with the rest of civilisation.
I do not know what you call “the rest of civilisation” but AFAIK it is the USA who is out of step with the rest of the world, civilised or not. This reminds me of the quote about “the English channel unpassable due to bad weather, the Continent is isolated”.
*In economic matters, the US system tends to dominate: even those countries that use the original, more logical system tend to use the US system for fiscal matters.
In science though, both systems remain, giving rise to great scope for confusion.*
I’ve read the rest of your post a million times but I still can’t see it’s relevance. No more use of irony for me while you’re around. fandango, milliard does exist but, in the UK anyway, the term is no longer in technical use. The US and Canadian equivalent in my dictionary (OED) is given as billion. Billiard, I cannot find except for a definition relating to the game of billiards.