VS: Why $ appears on the left side of value? (was: Re: BIDI percentage sign)

Sun Mar 1 08:52:17 CST 2015

Philippe.

Without getting deeper into this, the floating currency sign has been used in many countries and languages, e.g. for Dutch guilders in the Netherlands. In some countries, e.g., Portugal, the currency symbol has been (and in some countries still is being) used as a decimal separator. To me this is natural (as is the use of Fahrenheit-degrees, inches, feet and miles where appropriate); in fact I still prefer to use calories as opposed to joules.

Erkki I. Kolehmainen

Lähettäjä: CLDR-Users [mailto:cldr-users-bounces at unicode.org] Puolesta Philippe Verdy
Lähetetty: 1. maaliskuuta 2015 16:11
Vastaanottaja: Shervin Afshar
Kopio: cldr-users at unicode.org
Aihe: Re: Why $ appears on the left side of value? (was: Re: BIDI percentage sign)

2015-02-27 22:29 GMT+01:00 Shervin Afshar <shervinafshar at gmail.com>:

As far as common knowledge goes[1], this is purely a matter of convention.

But in some banking contexts, I've seen currency values written as follwos:

$200 USD...

$200 CAD

$200 AUD

200$00 CVE

€200 EUR

₪200 ILS

And just in English... This inversion is not used in most other languages.

So why could'nt that be also a question of convention for noting percents (or perthousands) ?

The notation of numbers with numeric figures does not abey the same rules as the natural language or its script. It is already the case for Arabic numbers (whose digits are ordered left to right, with the left-most digits being also pronounced first where numbers are spelled orally).

The percent symbol is also part of the numeric notation and I don't see why it would not be ordered exactly like the digits, i.e. to the right, even if it pronounced after the number. If one wants to write it the way it is pronounced, the "%" symbol should not be used but the plain Arabic word. Some writers may not follow this convention and will want to order the symbol as if it was a natural word *detached* from the numeric figures.

Note that the percent symbol is normally also attached typographically to the numeric figures.

If there's spacing, it is **not-breaking** (in French, the recommanded spacing between the numeric figures and the percent symbol is a non-breaking thin space, "espace fine insécable", best represented by NNBSP in Unicode : U+203F, though many sites still use NBSP=U+00A0, even if it is too large) or, by a "lazy" lame and non recommended way, no spacing at all, which is only acceptable for use in very compact tables with many data columns in order to fit the page without reducing font sizes (it will be prefered before suppressing number group separators).

My take on this is that, here redundancy is used to avoid ambiguity.

[1]: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11326/what-is-the-difference-between-20-and-20

↪ Shervin

On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 10:51 AM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

And why Mareicans are putting the currency unit symbol to the right ? It is still read *after* the amount...

The only readon I see is to avoid adding an initial digit when the amount is writen over a blank space. You can't add a digit after only because you also add the decimal separator and subunits, or because you write these subunits with a small fraction, or in superscript.. My feeling is that this is a purely typographical tradition and it ia not related to the way you read it loud.

For othe measurement units, the unit symbol is placed after the number, not before. This has nothing to do with the Bidi ordering : that symbol preserves its existing ordering even if you place it after or before by the choice of the redactor and his perception of traditions. Number figures use a different system than the rest of the text.

2015-02-27 19:14 GMT+01:00 James Lin <James_Lin at symantec.com>:

Hi
I looked through the Unicode standard Annex #9 and unable to find out if percentage sign "%" should reside on the LEFT of the numeric character or RIGHT?

My understanding is if the numeric is in Latin or Western Arabic number, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0, "%" sign should be on the RIGHT: 12%, 54%;   For Eastern Arabic, "%" sign should be on the LEFT:  %٩٦٥

Is this correct?

Thank you
-James

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