At best, I'm only a casual dilettante concerning CJK; I can recognize some
common radicals, but can spot fake CJK from hundreds of yards/meters away
.:)
Nevertheless, I was astonished to see the name of a local Chinese
restaurant
(Beijing Star, iirc) rendered horizontally RtoL. Just one more stage in
casual self-education...

I'm an often-distressed observer of changes occurring in our everyday,
commonplace
English language, maintaining that in our midst, a Popular English dialect
is
emerging. Among its attributes are something close to a de facto consensus
about
respellings ("alot", "accidently", etc.) and other aspects.

The subliterate posts on Slashdot (some are quite literate, as well) are my
primary source of Popular English. One item that has reached a near
consensus
is swapping directionality, in a sense, of the dollar sign and percent
symbols.

[ "20$" ]
Many centuries of tradition has placed the dollar sign just to the left of
the
most-significant digit (MSD) of the amount, preventing the handwritten
value
from easily being fraudulently increased by adding a digit. However, our
continuing loss of home teaching of cultural tradition means that the
uninformed
young follow the spoken sequence, and write dollar amounts with currency
symbol as a
suffix. (Afaik, some other nations routinely place the currency symbol
rightmost
in LtoR scripts.)

I have even seen the dollar sign as a small subscripted suffix, and think I
can
remember an instance of its being embedded (5$.79). Our local Muslim
(Lebanon->Sierra Leone->Montreal->Waltham) food store labels food as
"$2.99¢",
surely not a bad way. Very nice folks, btw! Doesn't hurt that I try to be
an
internationalist, if that term means what I hope it does.

Rather unrelated are "$500 dollars" and ".79¢".

[ "FE6A$" ]
It doesn't help for these young disconnected souls to know computer custom,
where
in some older environments, a $ suffix to a number means it is base-16,
hexadecimal.
(Btw, I have read that "hexadecimal" is not a learned spelling;
"hexidecimal"?)

[ <www.world%20treasures.com> ]
Further confusion follows from the special use of a % sign as a prefix to
permit
including otherwise-illegal characters into URLs and other such places.
Agreed, my
specimen (not a real one) is not a good one. These poor souls apparently
use
the % sign so rarely in ordinary life (also, the cultural disconnect is at
work...)
that they think one-half is "%50". I have seen numerous examples on
Slashdot.

(Why is it called "Slashdot"? Geek humor. Say "http://slashdot.org" aloud,
and see
whether a listener thinks you're stuttering.)

Nicholas Bodley |@| Waltham, Massachusetts
Using Opera 7.11 -- An excellent browser
--
Also using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client:
http://www.opera.com/m2/