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Eastern Arabic numerals
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Eastern Arabic numerals (also called Arabic-Indic numerals, Arabic Eastern Numerals) are the symbols (glyphs) used to represent the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in conjunction with the Arabic alphabet in Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India, and also in the no longer used Ottoman Turkish script ( ٠.١.٢.٣.٤.٥.٦.٧.٨.٩). A variant of the Eastern Arabic numerals is used in Persian and Urdu languages. ( ۰،۱،۲،۳،۴،۵،۶،۷،۸،۹). In Arabic, these numbers are referred to as "Indian numbers" ( أرقام هندية arqām hindiyyah). Confusingly, this name is also used in North Africa to refer to the numbers used in the Arabic Middle East.
They are sometimes also called "Indic Numerals" in English[1], however, this nomenclature is sometimes discouraged as it "leads to confusion with the digits currently used with the scripts of India"[2] (see Indian numerals).
In most of present-day North Africa, the usual Western numerals (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) are used; in medieval times, a slightly different set (from which, via Italy, Western "Arabic numerals" derive) was used. The numerals are arranged with their lowest value digit to the right, with higher value positions added to the left. This arrangement was adopted identically into the numerals as used in Europe. The Latin alphabet running from left to right, unlike the Arabic alphabet, this resulted in an inverse arrangement of the place-values relative to the direction of reading.