Yinglish in New York City, 100 years ago

[Geoffrey Steven Nathan]

Yes, you've got it right. Rather than trying to send Hebrew and Arabic text with this primitive email system, I'll just link to a couple of contemporary newspapers home pages, and, even if you don't know the first thing about how to read them you can see that the numbers are left to right and, of course, both writing systems are right to left:

http://www.haaretz.co.il/

http://aljazeera.net/news/pages/1d05f0ce-f9b9-486d-89b7-98ea1e59b019

I have no idea what the latter article is about, but you can see that numerals are in 'Roman' order, but the percent sign is on the left. In Hebrew it's on the right, as you can see in this page:

http://www.haaretz.co.il/misc/tags/1.3848

(see lower left where there's a link to 'Related Tags' about Bashar al-Assad, with 26%).

Geoffrey S. Nathan
Faculty Liaison, C&IT
and Professor, Linguistics Program
http://blogs.wayne.edu/proftech/
+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT)

Nobody at Wayne State will EVER ask you for your password. Never send it to anyone in an email, no matter how authentic the email looks.


----- Original Message -----

> From: "Amy West" <medievalist at W-STS.COM>
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2013 8:37:25 AM
> Subject: Re: Yinglish in New York City, 100 years ago

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Amy West <medievalist at W-STS.COM>
> Subject: Re: Yinglish in New York City, 100 years ago
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> 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.)

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