Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> Is anyone here familiar with Armenian? The CSS Level 2 specification
> from the W3C makes reference to "Traditional Armenian numbering" but
> Unicode doesn't seem to include any Armenian numbers, at least as
> such. Is this another language like Nebrew where the letters of the
> alphabet double as digits? Or are there some uniquely Armenian digits
> that Unicode is missing?
I don't know much about Armenian, but I think I happen to know this one.
Yes, numbers in Armenian are traditionally represented by letters. The
system is analogous to that of Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, i.e. the first nine
letters represent numbers 1 to 9, the following nine letters represents tens
10 to 90, and the remaining letters represent hundreds 100 upwards.
Notice that it is not strictly correct to call such numerals "digits",
because this term is referred to *positional* systems, where, e.g., "4"
means "four" in the rightmost position, "fourty" in the second position
leftwards, "four hundred" in the next one, etc. On the contrary, in the
alphabetic numerals above, each one of, e.g., "four", "fourty" or "four
hundred" have their own symbol.
See
http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsblame.cgi?file=mozilla/layout/html/base/src/nsB
ulletFrame.cpp for an open source implementation of Armenian (and other)
numbering systems for the HTML numbered lists in Mozilla.
Modern Armenian uses the usual European digits 0, 1, 2, ..., 9. I don't know
what the Armenian numbering system is used for nowadays, but I suspect that
it has a function similar to the Roman numbers in Western Europe (i.e.,
numbering list items, or the introductory pages of books, etc.).
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:13 EDT