Hello again, coming back to you after such a long time to give such a short blog post! And I updated my theme as well. I have to learn some CSS and start creating my own themes… most of these free WordPress themes are so badly-designed!
Well! I stumbled across this website completely by accident. According to this site, there are apparently Sinhala “digits”. Uh… who knew.
Here’s the link: http://www.sinhala-online.com/sinhala-digits-number-page.html
The site offers a “number converter”, and it doesn’t take a long time to figure out how to construct numbers using these digits. They look rather cool, very curvy, curly and artistic. (I’d love to have a T-shirt featuring number 80!) On the down side, they look way too complicated to be used in any kind of fast writing! Look at 70! That’s one monster of a digit. By the time you write that character, you could probably write around ten 70’s using your good old European digits!
Apparently, there has been some efforts to get these characters into Unicode, but they haven’t succeeded. It’ll be “cool” to have them just for the sake of having them in Unicode… but let’s be realistic. It’s not like anyone is going to be using these! Now that I think of it, I wonder if anyone has ever used them. Maybe they were used by the old kings, who didn’t mind spending an hour writing a simple number…
At this point I’m thinking “maybe everybody else knows this and I’m the only one who doesn’t”… but a part of me is still sceptical. It sounds like some kind of an elaborate prank. Well I guess this is real.
I also discovered that there are actually Tamil digits that have been put into Unicode. You can see them here. (And here too) I don’t know about Tamil digits much, but aren’t most of these Tamil letters as well? Now, the Unicode character code points are different, but how can the reader know the difference? For instance, the Tamil digit 1 (௧) has Unicode code point U+0BE7 and the character “ka” (க) has the Unicode code point U+0B95 but can you spot it? They are essentially the same character! Maybe you need to specifically indicate you’re writing a number, just to avoid confusion! But then again, like Sinhala digits, I doubt anyone ever uses them! Well maybe a few eccentric people do…
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