Robert Wheelock wrote:

> Our numerical digits should be termed *universal
> numerical digits* since they're the ones used
> throughout our world!

They are indeed very widespread, but there are still many people, including
we Westerners, which use other systems. So I think it is exaggerated (if not
unfair) to call them "universal".

Some of the alternative systems just differ in the external shape of the ten
digits:

- "Arabic-Indic" digits, are normally used in all the Eastern Arabic
countries (Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.); they are also used
sometimes in Western Arabic countries (Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia,
Morocco, etc.), besides the European digits.

- A second version of "Arabic-Indic" digits are used in non-Arabic countries
which use the Arabic alphabet (Iran, Pakistan, etc.)

- About a dozen local Indian sets of digits are used in India. Practically,
each Indian alphabet (apart Tamil) has its own set of digits. European
digits are now more common in India, but the traditional characters are
still in wide use.

- Same situation in South-East Asia (Thailand, Laos, etc.): European digits
are widespread but local digits are still alive.

- Chinese, Japanese and Korean have a special ideograph (a circle) for "0".
They use this special ideograph together with the usual ideographs for
numbers 1-9 to form positional decimal numbers. This way of writing numbers
is quite rare in horizontal writing (western numbers are used in this case),
but it is quite common in vertical writing. In Taiwan and Hong Kong it is
often used also horizontally, especially for phone numbers.

Other systems work in totally different ways, but are still used:

- In Europe herself, the Roman numerals are still used for some special
usages (numbered lists, months in dates, etc.).

- The Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Georgian, and Ethiopic scripts use
letters of the alphabet to represent numbers (Ethiopian numerals are a
modified version of the Greek alphabet). The scope of usage for this numbers
is similar to Roman numerals.

- Tamil has a non-positional numbering system: numbers 1-9 are similar to
other Indian alphabets, but then they have no zero and have extra numerals
for 10, 100, etc.

- Chinese, Japanese and Korean still make daily use of their ideographic
numbering notation, which is similar to the Tamil system.

_ Marco