Actually, whiteowl, I just got a response from my college linguistics teacher, and that assertion is incorrect.
Here is the complete letter:
Hi Kendall!
The number characters we use in the west are commonly called Arabic numerals but
the more accurate name used in the history of science is Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Europeans got them from Arabic mathematicians who in turn got them from Hindu
mathematicians.
The shapes of the numeral characters diverged somewhat from their original shapes,
as characters often do over time.
The characters used today in Arabic speaking countries have the same historical origin as
ours.
But those modern Arabic characters
are descended from a slightly different version of the original Hindu-Arabic numeral
character set: namely
the “Eastern Arabic numerals” used by Arabs further east than the north African ones
from which
medieval Europeans adopted numeral characters. (The Roman ones used before in
the west were such an unwieldy technology!)
The eastern characters have changed their shape
less over time than the ones the Europeans adopted. So modern numerals used by Arabs
look a lot more like the original Hindu-Arabic numerals than our numeral characters do.
There’s a good article in Wikipedia under “Arabic numerals”. I see there is a section
of “Evolution of Symbols” that has a table showing the correspondences between the various
historically-related numeral character systems that came out of the original Hindu ones.
Have a look!
These gradual changes in character shapes are similar to the way the single middle eastern
alphabetic character set—that apparently arose just once in history—
developed into all the different modern descendent alphabets, including
our Roman alphabet, the Greek alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, and many other alphabets.
(But not
non-alphabetic systems like Chinese characters, Korean characters etc.) The evolution
of our alphabet is an interesting story too. The story I gave you guys about Greek kappa
being historically the same letter as Roman c was just the tip of the iceberg.
all best from Germany,
Suzanne Kemmer