How come there are several widely used alphabets in the world (Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese etc) but only one set of numbers (Arabic) most of the world uses?

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While Latin Alphabet is dominant, Chinese and Arabic letters are widely used as well, along with several others. But most everyone in the world uses Arabic numerals, even though there are others. Why is that?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The arabic numerals are superior to other number systems that existed before them.

The trick of using the position of a numeral as a multiplier for it’s value comes from india, and reached europe through arabia (hence the name), and was always combined with those numerals being used.

Old number systems like roman numbers or the chinese numbers relied on using more and more symbols the larger your numbers get, because if you want to write a billion without using 1000 times the million symbol you need a new symbol in those systems where the value of all symbols is just added. Also stuff like long multiplication/division only works with arabic numerals. In roman numbers multiplication requires some tricks and a solution lookup table for a few basic operations.

For letters the opposite is true, languages all sound different, so a script that is designed specifically for a language works better for it. Look at polish or czech script that uses latin letters to write a slavic language, it’s full of diacritics and multi-letter combinations for sounds that would be a single letter in cyrilliv

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