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Re: Thai Numbering in gnome-doc-utils

Shaun McCance wrote:
On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 00:09 +0000, Simos Xenitellis wrote: 
Shaun McCance wrote:

So here's the Wikipedia entry on Greek numerals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals

Would you consider its definition of the Ionic numeral system
to be correct?  Would you prefer ϛ´ or στ´ be used for 6?
Also, I don't think I've ever seen a document with a million
sections, so I'm going to assume it's all right for me to
stop trying after 999,999.



Indeed, it is ok to go up to 999,999.
For number 6 please use   στ´
For 90 and 900, use the standard Ancient Greek symbols. In practical terms I believe those two numbers will not pop up very often. It is the most common in modern Greek, though there are some occurences of ϛ´. 
(Source: http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1938.pdf)


Quick question: An inverted acute is placed before a character
to make it larger by a factor of 1000.  So δ´ is 4, but ,δ´ is
4000.  All well and good.  But then, we're using στ instead of
ϛ for 6.  There's no ambiguity there, because σ and τ are both
digits in the 100s places, so they would never otherwise appear
together.

But now, what do we do when we want 6000?  Is it jut ,στ´ or
do we prefix both characters, as in ,σ,τ´?  With the former,
it's not clear if it means ,ϛ´ = 6000 or ,σ´ + τ´ = 200300.
Do I prefix both characters?
This is an interesting question. The issue here is that there is no single codepoing to represent στ. In addition to this, στ is a recent addition (last 80 years?) to Greek alphabetic numerals. Therefore, the general public would not recognise ϛ if it was used to represent 6. I expect the Greek alphabetic numerals will be most often used for numbered lists which should go up to 15-20. I am not sure if the numerals can be used for page numbers, and in this case they should typically go up to around 1000. 

Thus, please use ,ϛ´ for 6000.

Cheers,
Simos
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