Toffee Milkshake

littlebigdetails:

CNNArabic - Even the “Play” button has direction from right to left.

/via nikolay

Maybe a mistake I think, difficult to know without asking some native Arabic speakers which no one seems to have bothered doing here (or at least it’s not mentioned).

I made a comment in the discussion under the original post in response to someone talking about how play button is related to the direction of number lines and how arabic script has the same direction as us…

1. there’s no reason why we should write numbers with highest place value first, so the notion of which direction is right to left in the case of number notation is doubly confused.

2. Our numbers /are/ arabic numerals (or at least their direct 1 to 1 mapped descendants)  so it’s easy to argue that our numbers are actually right to left unlike the rest of our written script. Somewhere back in the mists of time we just took the system wholesale without realising (or perhaps just without caring) that the system was designed to put lowest place value first. Not that that matters, i guess that in fact it means that arabic mathmatics was able to more easily pass on its discoveries to european mathematicians

All of which is somewhat tangential but possibly interesting. 

I think it supports the idea that switching up the convention on the direction of the play button is misguided as commonly used symbols like numbers or the play symbol symbols are quickly abstracted from that which they supposedly represent. 

Consistency is more important.