RE: Digression: little/big endian numbers LTR/RTL

Very much the same (inversion of two-digit pairs when
speaking) is true for phone numbers in German-speaking
areas. How they are written may depend on the individual,
I know that I myself use both ways, but I haven't observed
myself close enough to know when I'm using which way.

Regards,    Martin.

At 21:56 08/05/10, CE Whitehead wrote:
>Hi, all, Najib tells me that I am somewhat mistaken, that telephone numbers, at least in Morocco (& I believe also in France), are treated as groups of pairs of two numbers, for example:
> 
>12 34 56
> 
>In Arabic these numbers have mixed directionality:
>> 
>> >>> 12 34 56
>> is read (en Arabe)
>> >>> two and ten, four and thirty, six and fifty.
> 
>That is, the members of the pairs are read as RTL, but the sequence of pairs is read LTR (?Najib, please correct me if I'm wrong):
> "two and ten, four and thirty, six and fifty" generally (this goes for classical and non-classical Arabic readings of telephone numbers aloud)
>>
>
>
>But they are not dialed in the same order that they are read aloud in:
> 
>So when someone reads 
>12 34 56 
>aloud in Arabic
> 
>as 21 43 65
> 
>you would dial the pairs as 12 34 56 (so the dialer processes written numbers as LTR it seems??):
>
>"two and ten" --> 12
>"four and thirty" --> 34
>"six and fifty" --> 56
> 
> 
>Thus the phone number 12 34 56 in English
>will be written as 12 34 56 in Arabic.
> 
>
>(Najib will correct me if I'm wrong I hope; I'm sharing his information with this list by permission I think).
>
>(My apologies to John Cowan who tried to tell me I really did not know how these numbers were written previously--and I'm still not sure how they are written; in any case, I really cannot pretend to be an expert on Kuwaiti telephone numbers because I only obtained them over the phone a couple of times, and was obviously Western and spoke Arabic poorly and may have gotten the numbers read to me in a Western order).
> 
>Sorry,
> 
>--C. E. Whitehead
><mailto:cewcathar@hotmail.com>cewcathar@hotmail.com 
>>


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Monday, 12 May 2008 06:51:13 UTC