From numbers to Numerals and Vice Versa

Universally used decimal representations, such as 5; 200; 856763; 189200000 are rendered (written, pronounced) differently in different languages. The number 5 is tllus five in English, fern in Swedish, cinq in French, ketsmala in Koyukon, biyar in Hausa and nga: in Burmese. Numbers can furthermore be written differently in different mathematical systems. The number 5 is written V in the Roman system and 101 in a system with base 2 (binary system). We will mainly be interested in the relations between the representations of the decimal system and Swedish numerals. Numerals in some other languages, such as English, German, French, Danish, Burmese, Hausa and Urdu will be touched upon briefly. In particular we are interested in rule systems (algorithms) that automatically convert mathematical representations into linguistic representations (numerals) or vice versa. Our interest in this area is part of a wider interest in Automatic Text Comprehension, 1 which in turn is part of the areas Automatical Language Translation and Artificial Intelligence. The study is focusing on problems that are due to the structure of numerals in (natural) languages. The technical problems that turn up when conversion rules are to be implemented on computer are not treated in this exploratory study. The practical applications of rule systems that convert mathematical representations into numerals or vice versa are automatic devices or robots of various types, e.g. the "automatic stock market announcer ", the "automatic cashier ", the "automatic accountant ", the