Friday, March 18, 2011

Riddle Me This

Even though Arabic is written/read right-to-left, numbers in Arabic go from left-to-right. Hence this (random) license plate:



?yaw taht ti od yeht dluow yhW

2 comments:

O Bloody Hell said...

?yaw taht ti od yeht dluow yhW

They're freakin' camel jockeys. You figured they'd get it right?

It's kinda like English spelling. The French invaded, the English barbarians picked up a load of loan words, and cluelessly corrupted the spelling used by an educated Frenchman. French is stupid and bizarre with all the silent letters (take any French book, take out all the silent letters and move them together, and the book will wind up half as thick) -- but the spelling does have fairly consistent rules, as compared to the bizarre non-ruled system that English has...

Bruce said...

It is probably because "arabic" numbers, specially "zero", are actually lifted from a much older mathematical culture in India.