Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/Numeration-Tutorial

(update in progress; information here may be outdated)

Finally, the first version of the Numeration tool is released! The current version will allow you to practise Chinese, English, Esperanto, French, German, Japanese, Spanish numerals! More languages to come...

If you are interested in providing hard-to-find information, please leave a comment.

What is the Numeration tool?

The Numeration project is for practising conversion of numbers from symbols to writing systems, written in Python and YAML.

Address: https://codeberg.org/GrimPixel/Numeration

What are Python and YAML, and why choose them?

Python

Python is one of the most favoured languages.

Why not Rust or TypeScript, but Python? Because Python codes are very easy to maintain, Python also has some unique useful features including f-string and negative indexing. In addition, Python has a lot of scientific libraries and is more relevant to my main area of study.

YAML

YAML is one of the most useful data serialisation formats.

And why not JSON or TOML, but YAML? Because YAML has a high readability and is very easy to maintain, at least no need to type soo many quotation marks.

By the way, XML is not that horrible, as described in that linked page. That is a joke with escape characters.

How to get started with Numeration?

1. Download the latest Python and install it, so you can run Python programs. For Linux users, the latest version can be installed following this article.
2. Download Python's YAML parser, so that the Python interpreter can understand YAML. If you are using Windows, tap WinKey, input "cmd", tap Enter, so the command line is opened. Copy the line starting with "pip" in that webpage, paste into the command line window, tap Enter. For users of other operating systems, you should already have known how to open the command line of your system, I suppose.
3. Install required packages in `requirements.txt`:

They are all open-source.

If a newer version of Python is available, and you want to use that version, you need to install packages like ruamel.yaml for the new version again. This is how Python works: users can have different versions with different packages and settings.

After doing this, go to that Address above (little punishment for those who don't read from the beginning). Download the source code and extract the compressed file.

Use command line to open 'numerate.py': For Windows, there is an article about this; for users of other operating systems, you should have known how to do this. Type 'python numerate.py', it will run in the command line.

There are two setting files:

• 'setting.yaml': details of the program, can be changed following the comment, including language selection.
• 'rule/setting/0.yaml': details of writings in languages, can be changed following the comment.

You can practise numbers with Google Translate TTS: in 'setting.yaml', change “mode” to “practising”, then run the program, select language setting, you will hear the TTS if supported; tap “Enter” to see the number in Western Arabic, tap “Enter” to see the writing.

Explain the code?

The main program is “numerate.py”. It reads your selected language codes, read the language settings (rule/library/setting.yaml), then read your subject (mathematical numeral, ordinal number, nominal number) selection number, then read the notation, convert it to Western Arabic, then call the language's “.py” file and show the result, finally ask you what to do next (do again from a step or end). This is going to be changed: everything before inputting the numeral will be settled in 'setting.yaml' first.

In the language “.py” files, everything is in a function “do”, so it can be called from another file (numerate.py) easily. They read the notation and the language setting as part of the input of the function “do”, then read the corresponding lexicon YAML file. Then the notation will be processed according to different notation types.

Magnitude and Archmagnitude

There are something to be noticed like the magnitude and archmagnitude.

Take the cardinal number 987654321 as an example:

• digit grouping: 3 (European)

	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1
magnitude	2	1	0	2	1	0	2	1	0
archmagnitude	2	2	2	1	1	1	0	0	0

• digit grouping: 3 (European double digit group)

	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1
magnitude	2	1	0	5	4	3	2	1	0
archmagnitude	1	1	1	0	0	0	0	0	0

• digit grouping: 4 (East Asian)

	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1
magnitude	0	3	2	1	0	3	2	1	0
archmagnitude	2	1	1	1	1	0	0	0	0

• digit grouping: [3, 2] (South Asian)

	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1
magnitude	1	0	1	0	1	0	2	1	0
archmagnitude	3	3	2	2	1	1	0	0	0

Construction of a natural number

There are two ways:

• write the digit and magnitude for each place; write the archmagnitude
• write each place or a combination of two places separately; write the archmagnitude

The first one is for Esperanto, Chinese, Japanese in mixed script of Kanji and Kana, etc.

The second one is for English, French, German, Japanese in Kana, etc.

If I want to add a language, what should I know?

There are several places you need to visit to make sure it works:

• 'numerate.py'
• 'setting.yaml'
• 'rule/setting/0.yaml'
• 'rule/library/language_decode.yaml'
• 'rule/library/language_encode.yaml'
• 'about/language.yaml'

Just pick a language that is similar to the language you want to add, copy and paste, do some modifications. This will suffice.

What's the future plan?

I need to

• simplify the recognition of notation type (from manual to automatic)
• add support for more numeral systems
• add support for more languages, in which languages being mostly learned and mostly used are given the priority, then official languages.

The old feature of “date and time” is moved to an upcoming new project “DateTime converter”.

I had a debate with myself: should the large archmagnitude by Conway-Guy and long scale in Chinese be supported? I thought that there are written rules for them, they exist, so they should be supported. Then I thought that as nearly no one is using them, they are practically not existing. I chose the latter. Maybe I would add support for them later, when I couldn't support more languages due to lack of references.

Planned next languages to be supported: Russian, Italian, Standard Arabic.

• Reviews: https://polyglotclub.com/language/multiple-languages/tool/14

AUTHOR

GrimPixel

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