[ih] Erratum in IEN 37

[Joseph Touch]

Hi, Brian,

> On Apr 6, 2021, at 10:33 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> As a curious side effect of some unusually acrimonious April 1st traffic in IETFland related to Jonathan Swift, I happened to go looking for IEN 37 to check on the big-endian/little-endian controversy that Danny Cohen settled therein. (He was certainly a wise man when it came to settling acrimonious debates.)
> 
> The problem I'm now grappling with is that Danny made one error, and there seems to be no errata process for IENs, so I thought I'd report it here, with the greatest respect to Danny's memory.
> 
> IEN 37 says:
> 
>> In English, we write numbers in Big-Endians' left-to-right order. I
>> believe that this is because we SAY numbers in the Big-Endians' order,
>> and because we WRITE English in Left-to-right order.
> 
> This is wrong.

Danny wrote:

1. English writes numbers big-endian L-to-R
2. Danny believed that this is:
	a. Because we say numbers in that order
And
	b. Because we write numbers in that order

Statement #1 is factually correct. I take Danny at his word for #2.

To your point:

> We write numbers in Arabic order (they're called Arabic numerals for a reason).

Numbers are visually expressed in Arabic order, which is highest value to the left on the page.

> 199 is written ١٩٩ in Arabic. (If that didn't come out right on your screen, your UTF-8 configuration is wrong.)

They both look roughly the same to me - highest value to the left on the page.

> That's big-endian in English script, but little-endian in Arabic right-to-left script

Perhaps, relative to the text, but not relative to how numbers are written down. Note that this doesn’t invalidate anything Danny said.

English numbers are written down left to right in big-endian order. It’s not clear whether Arabic does differently *for numbers*, even though its *letters* are written right-to-left. 

I suspect Arabic numbers are written “backwards” relative to letters, i.e., in the same way as English, because I agree that, approximately:

> (although my understanding is that it's *pronounced* big-endian in Arabic).

Almost. Like German, the ones and tens are inverted, as in:

	one thousand eight hundred three and seventy.

So neither Arabic nor German speak numbers in either big-endian or little-endian order.

—

As an aside, I’ve been fascinated to try to figure out how different languages insert “and” when they speak numbers.

Again, Arabic and German do so only between the ones and tens. If the ones is zero, the “and" is omitted. If ones are zero, there is no “and” AFAICT.

In English, “and” is inserted only for numbers with at least three digits when the tens are zero and the ones are not.

(The hazards of computational linguistics)…

Joe