Al Ha VeDa על הא ודא

Thursday, October 03, 2002

Posted 11:03 AM by Simon

Matras, anyone?

Life is so hard. How will I ever be famous if even people who acknowledge me don't link to me?

That article was interesting to read. I always thought that it would be obvious to anyone that the Hebrew numbering system is so straightforward that a child can master it, but for someone looking at the rules from the outside, without knowing the language or the culture, it somehow starts to seem “insanely complicated”.

The whole issue of complexity and simplicity is full of oddities. Even bearing in mind what I said above about looking at things from the outside, it seems to me obvious and objectively true that the Roman alphabet is beautifully simple while the Roman numbering system is ludicrously unwieldy; and that the Hindi numbering system in all its variants has the simplicity of genius while Devanagari script (which I am just trying to learn) is a nightmare of complex rules and special cases.