Oooh, the plot thickens. Another article:

This article reports on a mildly aphasic patient with major disorders in reading, writing, and number processing. His predominant error type in reading aloud Arabic numbers and in matching heard numerals with Arabic numbers was the violation of the inversion rule of the German Arabic number reading system. According to this rule most of the two-digit numbers or numbers in the final and prefinal position of longer digit strings have to be read beginning with the final digit (e.g. 26-->sechsundzwanzig (literally translated: six-and-twenty)). It is argued that AT's inversion errors (e.g., 26-->zweiundsechzig (literally translated: two-and-sixty)) are not consistent with the predictions of single route models of Arabic number reading but are in agreement with proposals of a visually based asemantic reading routine in addition to a semantically mediated reading routine.

I don't actually understand that last sentence. But the whole "German says numbers backwards" thing was a point I hadn't thought of when looking at the previous abstract.

Reading the quote made my head hurt. I shall have to massage my brain.

Oh wait. I r not as dumby as I thoughted.

I read part of the quote in the original post and combined it with part of the quote in occhi's comment.

Now I see what he's doing there.

Hee.

I've been looking into numeral dyslexia, and I just think it's fascinating that the parts of the brain that can read number words ("twenty-six"), decode numerals ("26"), say number words, say numerals, and do calculations all seem to be separate. And the examples above would indicate that they're even separate for each language a person speaks.

(I've been having trouble with transposing numerals lately. Hence the investigation.)

The human mind is a funny thing.

Three only very tangentially related things:

1) Pursuant to a meetup conversation with Miss Lynnster, I've hauled out my copy of The Arabic Alphabet after a long spell and have resumed trying to learn to read the squiggles. I'm relieved to report that it's turning out to be easier than I'd remembered.

2) I used to have Roman numerals down, but last month in DC I ran aground trying to read a year on the side of a building. I had to stop and write it down and work backwards.

3) I like pairs and dozens and scores.