Talk:Indian numerals
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In the June 8 2004 revision of this document, someone cited a reference and said that indian numbering system is indegenious (wonder if thats the right word) and is not taken from the chinese. The wiki article on Arabic numerals still referes to origins for this numbering system to chinese. Can someone verify this and correct it?
Thanx.
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[edit] Fish?
The article states,
- It is this fish shape that became the "10" of the Indian numerals.
I'm not sure what to make of this, since the "Indian numerals" (which the article defines to mean the Devanagari numerals) did not include a "10". Perhaps the author means that the Brahmi script used a fish for "10", and that this was passed down to later local scripts? And is this a claim that it was actually a fish glyph, or just shaped something like a fish? As far as I know, we don't know the source of any of the Brahmi numeral except the first three. kwami
[edit] Arabic Numerals derived from Indian
Actually technically speaking, the term "Arabic Numerals" is simply a misnomer for Indian Numerals. In "Arabic Numerals" only symbols have modified slightly with time, which does not qualify them as a separate numerical system. There are separate symbols for numbers in all Indian scripts, which does not qualify each of them as a separate numeral system.
[edit] This article should concentrate on Indian numerals, not Arabic
The term "Arabic Numerals" is not a misnomer. The West and much of the World uses Arabic Numerals, not Hindu numerals. Both Arabic and Hindu numerals belong to the Hindu-Arabic Numeral system. To say that "Arabic Numerals" is a misnomer is like saying that European languages are a misnomer since they belong to Indo-European languages and trace their origin to India, but Europeans speak European languages, not Indian ones. A similar example is of PHP and Perl or awk; PHP is derived from Perl, in turn derived from awk, but PHP is not a misnomer and it shouldn't be claimed that the correct term should be Perl or awk, it isn't.
This article [indian numerals] should concentrate on Indian numerals, not Arabic. All discussion of Arabic numerals should be referred to their page.
[edit] Please, more information on Indian Numerals
Please leave out Arabic Numerals in this article and instead focus on Indian Numerals. This article needs more information on Indian Numerals, in as many varieties of them as possible. csssclll 051208
[edit] My edits on 051208
I removed the Charles Seife quote, please see talk:Arabic_numerals for the reason. I also removed history of Arabic Numerals and instead linked to it. csssclll 051208
