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Comment by askthereception | Hacker News Reader

"Unlike the rest of the language, numerals are written left-to-right."

Everyone makes this mistake. It is rather the case that in English (and other languages) numerals are written right-to-left. You can tell since, when reading right-to-left, you will know exactly what each number signifies. If you start from the left, you will not know what the first number signifies until you have reached the end of the whole number.

Interesting to learn though that in Arabic it is still pronounced from left to right, up until the tens.

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It actually used to be right to left, just like the language! In some formal communication it's still the case, like when news channel announce new year "one and eighty and nine hundreds and a thousand. The change to read from left to right started fairly recently in the twentieth century, along with the change of the order of alphabets from أبجدهوز to أبتثجحخ.

I'm a native Arabic speaker, and yes I still struggle to both: speak P and hear P, Put no BroPlem!

I'm curious, when was it right to left?

In computer speak, the way we write numbers in English is 'big endian'. We write the most significant digit first.

The most common 'little endian' system is postal addresses, where we start with the smallest unit (name) then in, some cases, house number, street, city, country.

Note that roman numerals are commonly written in big ending way. So this practice is very old.

Yet historically English numbers were little endian, base twenty: "four and twenty" etc. Base 20 comes from Celtic roots I think, so perhaps other European languages have a similar history too.

Actually for example 1959 in Arabic the modern way to say it is "A thousand and nine hundred and fifty nine - الف وتسعمائة وتسعة وخمسون" but we also can say (and this is the old way) "Nine and fifty and nine hundred and a thousand - خمس ﻮ تسعون ﻮ تسع مئة وألف" which from tight to left.

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