RE: Armenian numbers

From: Jonathan Rosenne (rosenne@qsm.co.il)
Date: Mon Sep 04 2000 - 09:54:41 EDT


See http://people.netscape.com/ftang/i18n.html#number

Jony

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com [mailto:Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com]
> Sent: Monday, September 04, 2000 2:56 PM
> To: Unicode List
> Subject: RE: Armenian numbers
>
>
> 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/ba
se/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



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