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Re:The Double-Entry Counting Method (2016) by gumby on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @11:38AM (#23976878)
Yeah, many hindu digits are ostensibly by inspection the origin of the Latin digits we use today in the west, while the Persians and Arabs adapted the system to their own writing (which you can also tell by looking at the actual arabic digit system which has different glyphs but orders the numbers the same way the Hindus did — so numbers are written little endian in Arabic but spoken big endian like everyone else). They are quite reasonably referred to as hindu-arabic simply because the Islamic scholars introduced them to Europe.

Likewise we ought to refer to most of Greek philosophy, poetry, and literature as “Greek-Arabic” as without the Islamic scholars who preserved it very little would have survived.

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