Particularities in Writing and Language
½ is also one of the few fractions to get a key of its own on typewriters (see fractions). It also gets its own point in some early extensions of ASCII at 171; and in Unicode, it gets its own code point at U+00BD (decimal 189) in the C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement block, and a cross-reference in the Number Forms block, which contains some other fractions.
One half is as well one of the few fractions which is commonly expressed in natural languages by suppletion rather than regular derivation; compare English one half with regular formations like one sixth from six.
Read more about this topic: Halves
Famous quotes containing the words particularities in, writing and/or language:
“The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.”
—Eldridge Cleaver (b. 1935)
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)