Arabic Reads Right to Left. Its Numbers Do Not. — Epoche A2
Arabic is written from right to left, but the numbers inside an Arabic sentence are written from left to right. A price, a date, a phone number: the line turns round for the digits and then turns back. Here are the questions this always produces. So which way does 1445 go? The same way you would write it in English: thousands on the left, units on the right. How is a phone number written, then? Left to right, in the ordinary order, sitting inside a right-to-left line. The eye meets the number from the right, jumps to its left end, and reads forward. Are the digits the same shapes? Often not. Europe's digits did come from the Arab world, but the eastern Arab countries use different shapes. The one that catches every visitor: zero is a small dot, and the sign that looks like a European zero is five. How do children learn to switch direction? Not as a rule. They learn to read, and the switch happens inside the reading, like a hand changing gear. Is a number said aloud in that order too? Not always. In the older way of counting, twenty-five is said as "five and twenty". So a language need not run one way. Arabic sends its words one way and its numbers the other, and readers manage both without noticing.