Fascinating, thank you. It's interesting how the Arabic numerals in the dates are flipped 90°, as opposed to in some right to left scripts where they are just reproduced as is. I've always thought this would hinder the flow of the reading, but I suppose small numbers (for most people) are instantly recognised rather than being parsed left to right.
Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, where they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. It was when the numbers were imported into left-to-right scripts that the order of digits was reproduced as-is, but read backwards.
I don't know if the original Hindu system read from most significant left digit first, but if it did then the historical transmission into Europe may have entailed two flips of numeric endianness.
> I don't know if the original Hindu system read from most significant left digit first
The Sanskrit language (exemplifying the "Hindu system") had the same pattern as English for the teens, i.e:
11: ekadaśa = eka (1) + daśa (10)
12: dvadaśa = dva (2) + daśa (10)
13: tridaśa = tri (3) + daśa (10)
etc ..
In Sanskrit this pattern (least significant non-zero digit spoken first) continues through to larger numbers.
so:
20: vimśati
21: ekavimśati
120: vimśati-śatam
1121: ekavimśati-śatam-sahasra
etc.
But it's important to remember that the spoken rendering of numbers in all these languages precedes the written representation by millenia. People have been counting much longer than they have been writing. Of course later ways of speaking the numbers may have been influenced by writing systems, but the spoken rendering of basic smaller numbers tend to be relatively stable over time.
> Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages
But I thought they originated in India, where left-to-right scripts were in use, which is why Arabic is bidirectional with the digits written left-to-right.
So in German the number “21” is spelled “einundzwanzig” which means “one and twenty” compared to “twenty (and) one” in English. If you were to say “einundzwanzig” to me I’d most likely write down the 1 immediately and then put the 2 in front of it, if it’s utmost important to get the number right. This is really common also among the Dutch (they have the same thing) as well.
And one of our most common mistakes when speaking English is saying the number wrong. For example, 85 is pronounced fünfundachtzig, five and eighty, but it would not be uncommon for a German to misspeak in English and say fifty-eight.
I wonder if this has anything to do with what you wrote?
Could be inherited from arabic as cited by another (does all western numbering system derive from hindu-arabic?). What really intrigues me is why specially the tens are reversed. If it were some practical utility or reliability feature (saying the most important first/last?) I'd expect a fixed order throughout. Maybe it's just a random irregularity.
Wait, so 1,672 in arabic script would have appeared the same way, but would have been read as (something like) "two seventy six hundred and a thousand"?
