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In the 17th century, the decimal point popular in Britain was also used in continental Europe, though some preferred the decimal comma. Why is the decimal comma used in most European countries? Thanks to the English translation of Napier’s treatise on logarithms, the decimal point became widespread in Britain as far back as the 17th century. In the 16th century, Italian cartographer Giovanni Antonio Magini and German mathematician Christopher Clavius were among the first to use a decimal point in their publications.īut the person who popularized the use of the decimal point was the inventor of logarithms, Scottish mathematician John Napier.
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The decimal point, it seems, though historians of mathematics aren’t certain. Which came first, the decimal point or the decimal comma? These symbols include the dot, comma, inverted comma, vertical bar, horizontal line, colon, semicolon, and even number zero.Įspecially in the 17th and 18th centuries, mathematicians used whichever notation seemed to strike their fancy, and so did typesetters. Throughout history, mathematicians have used all kinds of symbols to separate integers from decimals. Why do European countries use a decimal comma instead of a decimal point? For example, in British Canada the decimal point is used, whereas in French Canada a comma is used as a decimal separator. And still in some other countries, both the decimal comma and the decimal period are used. In other countries, including most European countries, a comma is used before decimals. In many countries, in their respective languages, a period appears before decimals. In contrast, in the United States (as well as in other English-speaking countries including Australia, New Zealand, and the UK), the same amount is written as 300.10, using a decimal point. This means, for example, that three hundred euros and ten cents is written as 300,10-with a comma as a decimal marker. In most European countries, a comma is used to separate the integral part of a number from the decimal part. A document that was translated into English from another language may use the number formatting of the source language, no matter how confusing that may seem to a native English speaker. Of course, a document written in English by someone from a country in Europe may have numbers formatted as in English.
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Specifically I use a letter substition system to write greek words in english.In brief: Number formatting in Europe Number formatting in Europe: The decimal separatorīefore diving into this topic, I want to clarify that in this article, when I talk about how the decimal separator or thousands separator is used in a country, I’m referring to the language of that country, not to how its residents or citizens format numbers when writing in English. The names presented here are therefore transliterations of the original greek. I dont concern myself with these details, and I simply chose the first case in these instances. Latin has different names for certain numbers based on context. If your interested you can learn about urdu numbers at this link.īasically it provides short names for the first 1000 or so counting numbers NEXT 1.2.6a Unique Designators Pt. These will come in handy later as you will see, for naming large numbers. The following two tables display all the word components you would need to count to a thousand in no less than 14 different languages. This same approach ( called transliteration ) has been used on the Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Swahili, Sanskrit, and Thai languages. The Greek number words here are the result of translating Greek letters to approximate English letters based on phonetics (the way the Greek letters are pronounced ).