Esme Es Mejor
Member
Though there are only two ways to round, there are infinite dollars. We round to the nearest one.
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Discussion of Numerical Punctuation
- Thread starter Electroman
- Start date
Though there are only two ways to round, there are infinite dollars. We round to the nearest one.
We should terminate this thread, and the Entire Forum, in homage to the indomitable, unduplicable, eternally unequaled Victor B.
This is all interesting, but Mr. Tarantino has the right idea as does:
Living in two countries with different dominant languages, one of which has two co-dominant languages, the use of language itself, all manner of punctuation and other conventions becomes a multitude of ambiguous and often mutually exclusive numbering conventions, grammar and syntax. That ignores syntax too.
I have my computers set to use appropriate local conventions as much as possible. That is a major deficiency.
Anyway when the President of one of my two countries cannot speak his own native language with secondary school level standards we probably are better of accepting the Tarantino rule.
Living in two countries with different dominant languages, one of which has two co-dominant languages, the use of language itself, all manner of punctuation and other conventions becomes a multitude of ambiguous and often mutually exclusive numbering conventions, grammar and syntax. That ignores syntax too.
I have my computers set to use appropriate local conventions as much as possible. That is a major deficiency.
Anyway when the President of one of my two countries cannot speak his own native language with secondary school level standards we probably are better of accepting the Tarantino rule.
cpa
Active Member
President Temer is old but he does manage to speak with clear coherent sentences. He also has written a couple of books on constitutional law (not ghostwritten) and even a poetry book (that one I will not recommend, but it was his and his alone). Like him or not he's literate, Besides he speaks a little bit of his parents maternal language, Arabic.That has to be the President of Brasil [sic] right?
Nope, Brasil has had some spectacularly semi-literate and even illiterate politicians, but Michel Temer is not one of them.
BTW, pedantically: It is not Brasil (sic). Brasil is the legal name of the country and the tree for which it was named. In English the word is spelled Brazil. Both are correct in their specific languages. The name origin is from Pau-brasil, which name derived from the reddish colour of the wood (genus Caesalpinia). As President Temer knows Brazil is the only country named after a tree.
cpa
Active Member
Sorry, JBC.
My comment was meant to be funny, and I guess I failed. I did not know who your president is, but I assumed that he was quite literate and educated, unlike his counterpart to the north. That was my attempt at some droll humor.
I deliberately wrote, "Brasil [sic]," because I understood that Brazil is your native country, and Portuguese is your native language. I inserted [sic] to alert you to the fact that I intentionally spelled your country the way that you spell it, not those of us in the US. Doubtless you know that sic is Latin for thus, and it is the method the author of printed words alerts the reader as to why a certain usage or spelling was written.
I appreciated your brief history of the etymology of Brazil/Brasil. Good stuff.
Cheers!
Getting back to the discussion of numerals - if not their punctuation - many moons ago I was exposed to the following. I have zero evidence to back up that there is historical truth to it, but...sure! why not!
As follows: the story is the Arabic system is such that each of the nine primary numbers are represented by images that contain that number's amount of interior angles, as demonstrated by my little sketch, below:
As follows: the story is the Arabic system is such that each of the nine primary numbers are represented by images that contain that number's amount of interior angles, as demonstrated by my little sketch, below:
Interesting theory. Although 9 goes little to far.
Wikipedia gives Brahmi numerals - Wikipedia as origin of ours, but those are unrecognizable.
For me m=0,001 and M=1 000 000 (in front of other unit)
Nm = Newton*meter
mN = milli Newton
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jkn's post caused me to perform an internet search, wherein one can find a lot of chest-puffed-up essays declaiming my little story as tosh....which I suspected to be so. To defend myself against any nefarious thoughts that I might have been swayed by fake news....first, I didn't say I believed it, and second, I've had that little nugget stored in the front part of the posterior portion of my pre-frontal cortex since long before Arpanet showed up....
It is interesting theory, even if not true. When writing on paper round shapes are easier to do. When writing on stone or wood straight lines with corners are easier. It is easy to imagine somebody thinking like that long time ago.jkn's post caused me to perform an internet search, wherein one can find a lot of chest-puffed-up essays declaiming my little story as tosh....which I suspected to be so. To defend myself against any nefarious thoughts that I might have been swayed by fake news....first, I didn't say I believed it, and second, I've had that little nugget stored in the front part of the posterior portion of my pre-frontal cortex since long before Arpanet showed up....
That's an interesting, and very easy to confirm, point about the difference of presenting images on paper (i.e., with an ink-bearing tool) vs. on a hard surface one must incise.
Here's another - and there is no controversy about this.
As is familiar to all in European and, I am pretty sure but not certain, in Arabic and possibly Indus cultures, a standard method of "counting up" is to use four hash marks and cross with the fifth, as below.
Now, in Japan - I do not know about China but again, it is likely - the method is slightly more elegant because the final figure, as shown below, is itself the Sino-Japanese ideogram for "5". One counts up by making the five lines that create the character.
The only glitch is that under standard orthography, one creates this ideogram not with five brush strokes, but with four: the middle horizontal and the right-hand near-vertical are combined as one stroke. But when counting up, these strokes are distinct.
Here's another - and there is no controversy about this.
As is familiar to all in European and, I am pretty sure but not certain, in Arabic and possibly Indus cultures, a standard method of "counting up" is to use four hash marks and cross with the fifth, as below.
Now, in Japan - I do not know about China but again, it is likely - the method is slightly more elegant because the final figure, as shown below, is itself the Sino-Japanese ideogram for "5". One counts up by making the five lines that create the character.
The only glitch is that under standard orthography, one creates this ideogram not with five brush strokes, but with four: the middle horizontal and the right-hand near-vertical are combined as one stroke. But when counting up, these strokes are distinct.
Handwriting is going the way of the typewriter.
So it's time to start slamming the qwerty keyboard, right? :-D
I always was puzzled why computers did not use a hard push to create uppercase characters. Touch normally, lower case. Push til it clicks, uppercase.
Then they did some really silly things.
Lowercase is , and uppercase is < lowercase is . uppercase is > - Uh... Why not <> and ,. so it makes sense? Ditto for + and -.
Spacebar should have doubled as ALT/Control. Hit the spacebar and release, it spaces. Hold spacebar while hitting another char, it does the ALT, push the spacebar until it clicks and hit another char, it's Control, or if you don't it spaces.
Now you've cleared up a lot of real estate and made for quicker use with fewer mistakes. So you have room put Computer Special Chars closer to your fingers. @ .com and other commonly used chars.
So it's time to start slamming the qwerty keyboard, right? :-D
I always was puzzled why computers did not use a hard push to create uppercase characters. Touch normally, lower case. Push til it clicks, uppercase.
Then they did some really silly things.
Lowercase is , and uppercase is < lowercase is . uppercase is > - Uh... Why not <> and ,. so it makes sense? Ditto for + and -.
Spacebar should have doubled as ALT/Control. Hit the spacebar and release, it spaces. Hold spacebar while hitting another char, it does the ALT, push the spacebar until it clicks and hit another char, it's Control, or if you don't it spaces.
Now you've cleared up a lot of real estate and made for quicker use with fewer mistakes. So you have room put Computer Special Chars closer to your fingers. @ .com and other commonly used chars.
arcus
Active Member
Same here, and "1" as you see it here - not a straight line. There was no confusion. My better half (from a different country and continent) was trying to refute me, as she was always thought "1" to be written as "I" and "7" as you see here. Small things, but what a difference they make.
Also, talking about hardship of writing vs typing, us lefties always had it uphill (or side-hill?). I digress
TexLaw
Member
I don't know if I agree, but I sure like the argument.
"Hindu-Arabic numerals, set of 10 symbols—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0—that represent numbers in the decimal number system. They originated in India in the 6th or 7th century and were introduced to Europe through the writings of Middle Eastern mathematicians, especially al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi, about the 12th century. They represented a profound break with previous methods of counting, such as the abacus, and paved the way for the development of algebra."
Hindu-Arabic numerals | History & Facts
As my soft-spoken and brilliant linguistics professor was wont to say...
wont | Origin and meaning of wont by Online Etymology Dictionary
wont | Origin and meaning of wont by Online Etymology Dictionary
Meaning: "accustomed," Middle English contraction of Old English wunod, past participle of wunian "to dwell, inhabit, exist; be…
" wise scholars are accustomed to be prepared for new information leading to revised attribution." As usual, she left us to figure that on own. Our class in Old English ended with two 'A' grades for my roommate and myself. I because my roommate tutored me, he because he was the equal of the professor. The two remain the most intelligent human beings I have met, AFAIK.
That is the background. Here is the story:
The "Brahmi" formed the foundation of India-European symbolic logic including much of semantics and numerology. True! However, they made rather a mess of it from a numerical perspective because they really did not conceive numerology, just a set of symbols;
That "...just a set of symbols" provided the crucial representational basis for some Hindus a few hundred years later to make zero real, and derive all numbers from 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0.
I'll not object if the zero is to be placed first since...
Once Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī...
Al-Khwārizmī | Muslim mathematician
...found those Hindu ideas he used them to write "Algebra' and "algorithm" among other books. The rest is modern history.
Thus I choose to refer to the modern numerals as "Arabic" for if they had not been used to invent algebra and analytic representational logic we'd probably never have had our nice numbering systems but might still be attempting to make the Roman system work.
We probably would never have had Mathematics, Chemistry, Agriculture, Astronomy or Geography as we now do have it not been for those Arab thinkers.
From an etymological perspective it is easier to see specific contributions in several Romance languages than it is in English. Why? Because Romance languages derived from either Classical Latin (e.g. Italian, Romansch, Castilian [aka: Spanish) or Vulgar Latin (i.e. language used by the rulers to govern distant tribes)(i.e. Portuguese, Provençal, Catalão)
while English is a West German tongue most closely related to modern Dutch and Danish. Partly as a result of that linguistic history the Romance languages, especially the ones thatt have languages derived from vulgar Latin, coincidently have higher Arabic content than other languages because they were rules by Arabs during the same periods that Arabs were busy developing modern mathematics, agriculture and stellar navigation. Latterly, most of those have felt threatened by those Germanic and Frankish tongues so they have developed fairly exotic ways to assess the provenance of their languages.
So, we know that ~10% of the Portuguese language derives from Arabic but there is no way to know for English precisely because English has no clear national identity. After all what country has the largest number of people for whom English is their mother tongue? Obvious answer: India. Same question for Portuguese? Brazil. Why the difference? For our purposes that actually is important.
The Romance languages and the primary Germanic ones have clear and regular grammar and standard processes for importing and using vocabulary. Their more jingoistic linguists count derivations and fight over issues that would not begin to work for English. That is because those languages carry a particular cultural history and thus a certain consistency.
English has the largest number of words of any extant language precisely because there are not any standards. Dialectical differences in English are astonishing but almost everyone pretends there are not such differences. For example, I offer the following gathering, one of each native speaker fo English: Indian from Kerala, Pakistani from Punjab, Australian from Darwin, US from Enterprise, AL and another from Boston, MA, English from Bristol and another from Lindisfarne. 100% probability they'll have serious problems communicating.
Long story, but that is the problem of the Arabs of the 5th to 10th centuries was that they wanted to travel, understand,and communicate more. They also had a strong desire to spread their thoughts. Partly because their language was hard for other people to adopt, (not that they were so adept at coercion as were the Romans) so they used their newly developed technologies and numerology. Thus they spawned what came to be called "the Enlightenment". Once they taught everyone they found how to use Algebra, Algorithms, Agriculture (scientifically, that is), Astronomy and Geography what happened?
Everyone went loony with new ideas so Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Newton and many more had the tools they needed to communicate beyond the limits of traditional language. That, in the end, enabled Nicolai Tesla, Thomas Edison, Space X and Tesla. What is common? A rigid adherence to mathematical integrity. Everything else follows.
Now to prove I can make this bizarre discourse OT for the thread her goes:
Periods vs commas matter in the same way metric vs Imperial matter.
Metric works because all things are represented within a strict logical unified system. Everyone understands, nobody need translate anything to anybody else. If one does not understand one must study the subject. Clear and direct.
Periods do work the same way. Periods act as simple separators between thousands. Commas act to form a list, or to separate portions of a single related thought.
If we follow such a convention globally the confusion ends. If we don't it does not.
I say that with a strong opinion because I live comfortably with both systems. With commas as separators people do sometimes get confused. With periods I have not encountered such confusion. It is really too bad that while inventing Algebra and Algorithm he did not define number grouping syntax just a bit more than he did.
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