While it’s easy to imagine that our counting systems are generally based on 10 digits because we have 10 fingers, and that calculating in increments of 5 is also easy because it’s half of our total fingers, I wonder why numbers are read from left to right and not the other way around.
Even in Hebrew, the words of which are read from right to left, the numbers are read from left to right. Why? Are there any numerical systems that read from right to left?
Why is One hundred ‘100′ and not ‘001′? Is it the way our brains naturally perceive sequences? I don’t think it is, considering, again, Hebrew text reads right to left, and Asian scripts read from top to bottom and progress from right to left.
I was born in 2891. I am 52 years old. It is currently the year 8002. As a university student, I earned 05.6$ per hour working at a Chinese tea shop in Isla Vista, which meant my yearly income as a part-timer was a meager 4806$.
4 Comments
July 3, 2008 at 10:42 am
I wonder if it has to do with the way the brain is wired…isn’t it the left side of the brain that is responsible for numerical concepts and what not?
July 3, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but you could potentially draw a parallel to the little-endian / big-endian issue (kind of, that only specifies the byte order, within which the LSB is still the smaller unit.)
It alway struck me as off that even in Arabic, which is a right to left language, the numbers are also left-to-right. I would really expect in RTL languages that numbers are also RTL, but…
July 3, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Is this a convention that’s only in language, right? When someone is doing math for mathematics’ sake, surely it wouldn’t matter. I seem to remember that ancient Chinese would create columns of beans or pebbles to represent numbers. (And a column is a row if viewed properly.) They’d know a number was prime when the string of beans could not be broken and rearranged into several rows in a rectangle. Therefore prime numbers became slightly masculine. (A straight column is phallic, I admit.)
For instance: 6 versus 3.
*****
becomes
***
***
or
**
**
**
*** cannot be turned into a rectangle. It’s prime.
July 15, 2008 at 7:18 am
Well, all the numerical systems mentioned (except CJK) derive from the “arabic” numerals, which actually come from India. And Sanskrit is written left-to-write I believe…
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