Re: SI units (was: Expressing fractions)

From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela_at_cs.tut.fi)
Date: 01/10/05 

Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 11:45:04 +0000 (UTC)

Lee Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:

> Of course, we use European-Arabic numbers and Latin letters for the
> numbers and units in _technical_ documents to achieve that purpose.
> But what do you expect in a novel?

I would expect a novel to use normal prose, which means using _words_ (not
symbols or abbreviations of any kind), perhaps even colloquial words
(like "kilo" for "kilogram") for units, and expressing numbers in words as
well, as far as feasible. "Then we walked two kilometers/kilometres" would
surely be stylistically preferred to "Then we walked 2 km". In novels,
except perhaps science-fiction novels, I would not expect to see exact
expressions of physical quantities much.

Newspapers and similar publications are a different issue. I can only say
that they _should_, in my opinion, use SI notations for physical
quantities, both for conciseness and exactness, as well as to help readers
to get tuned to reading more technical and more scientific publications
(in different languages). In a sense, using the SI is a signal of taking
the job of writing nonfiction prose seriously, just as correct spelling,
correct punctuation, and correct use of terms are.

(BTW, the common numbers written using 0, 1, 2, etc. should probably be
called Indic-Arabic-European numbers, if we wish to express the cultural
origin. Alternatively, we might call them simply "universal numbers", since
that's what they are in the modern world.) 

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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