Yinglish in New York City, 100 years ago

[Amy West]

That's really interesting.

Just so I'm clear on it, it's standard in right-to-left text traditions
for numbers to be read opposite the text direction, that is
left-to-right, yes?  I guess with the Arabic numeral system, it could be
thought of as still being read right-to-left in terms of going from
smaller to larger place markers. But the Roman system does that as well,
doesn't it?

Huh.

Really, really interesting. (Sorry for thinking out loud and basically
being an infant rediscovering gravity by dropping my food from my high
chair.)

---Amy West

On 6/11/13 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> Date:    Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:40:07 -0400
> From:    "Joel S. Berson"<Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject: Re: Yinglish in New York City, 100 years ago
>
> I believe the same is true of other languages written right-to-left,
> such as Chinese and Japanese.  And also for Roman-alphabet words
> embedded in the Chinese or Japanese text.  Becomes a challenge for
> word-processing software.  Thinking about line wrap warps my mind.
>
> Joel
>
> At 6/10/2013 10:05 AM, Alice Faber wrote:
>> >This is correct. The numbers in Hebrew and Yiddish work exactly as in
>> >languages written with the Roman alphabet. (Hebrew religious texts have
>> >a different system, whereby letters of the alphabet represent numbers:
>> >aleph=1, bet=2, ... yod=10, kaph=20, etc., and so forth.)

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org