RE: Not all Arabics are created equal...

From: Gregg Reynolds (greynolds@greynolds.com)
Date: Thu Jun 29 2000 - 21:59:55 EDT


To the original request, I suggest you try to get ahold of "cram school"
textbooks from Egypt or some other Arab country. Indeed the practice may
vary by region (as does punctuation). In Egypt, there is a vigorous market
for such textbooks for all grade levels in all subjects. Unfortunately, my
collection only includes literature and language, and I've only been able to
find a few minor examples of formulae. The back-cover advertisements for
other texts in the series, however, trumpet math studyguides in English.
Yet I'm almost certain I've seen Arabic-only math books.

As a point of fact: Arabic is not bidirectional, in spite of the
protestations of Unicode. It's more accurate and less prejudicial
technologically to call call it a Least-Significant-Digit-First language.
English is a MSD-First language. The distinction between "logical" and
"visual" orders is factitious in a fairly obvious way, once you think about
it. "Natural" versus "technological" would be a more accurate pair of
terms, since the distinction is entirely an artifact of western economic and
technological dominance.

-gregg

> -----Original Message-----
> From: brendan_murray@lotus.com [mailto:brendan_murray@lotus.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2000 6:07 PM
> To: Unicode List
> Subject: Re: Not all Arabics are created equal...
>
>
>
> "Michael Kaplan (Trigeminal Inc.)" <v-michka@microsoft.com> wrote
> > Issues such as this one can obviously cause major issues
> since it even
> > affects logical vs. visual order of numbers!
> I don't think there was any suggestion that the logical order
> would differ:
> AFAIK, only the display varies.
>
> B=
>
>
>



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