2700: The Non-Roman Origins of Roman Numerals | May 12, 2024

Unlike other letter-based numerals that use the letters in ascending order of the alphabet, like Greek or Hebrew, Roman numerals are more abstracted, and somewhat systematic. For instance, X is 10, and take ½ of that for V (5), which is the top half of X. The X is probably derived from adding on an extra line at the end of a set in an early tally marks system. This works the same in M (1,000) and D (500), but not in the way that you might think. 

These letters are not tied to words, though M was reinforced by Latin ‘mille’ for ‘thousand’, and the original form of M in numerals was ↀ, half of which is D. This originated in pre-Roman Etruscan numerals, that used C (100), IↃ (500), and CIↃ (1,000) and these bracketed-I forms then were written as similar looking letters, and C reinforced by ‘centum’. In fact, though not as typically used, other forms ↁ (10,000) and ↂ (50,000) exist from this system of adding brackets. The shapes of the letters, and some Latin words may have slightly influenced the form of Roman numerals as in the case of ↀ→M, but in almost all other cases (I,V,X,L,D) these symbols only coincidentally looked like letters and have nothing to do with the words they represented.

2530: Welsh Numbers Nov 16, 2021

People may be aware that French numbers use somewhat mathematical descriptions, like soixante-dix for 70 meaning sixty-ten, and 'quatre-vingts' for 80 meaning 'four-twenties' but Welsh numbers are even more extreme. Indeed, there are actually two different systems, one decimal and one vigesimal. The decimal system operates similarly to English's decimal system, but the vigesimal is base-20 for all numbers so to say '30' it is 'deg ar hugain' (ten on twenty), '40' is 'deugain' (two twenty) and likewise for 60 and 80. To say ‘70’ is 'deg a thrigain' (ten and three twenty) and likewise for 90, but 50 is 'hanner cant’ (half a hundred) which also does not exist in the decimal system. The vigesimal system is more common when talking about dates and ages etc. and people may switch back-and-forth. There are many internal variations as well, including dropping the prepositions, or adjectival forms.

1668: 2 and ב Jul 9, 2019

While the numerals used in Western society, are from India , there are some links to closer cultures. For instance, many systems use letters, such as Roman numerals or Hebrew numerals. For instance, the second letter in the Hebrew is ב. This historically was used to represent 2, and many believe it also had an influence on the development of the numeral. Although they are called Arabic numerals by some, the Arabic version for 2 is much different: ٢.

Check out the new video that's out today on grammaticality: https://youtu.be/g-6K99Jz9hY

1493: Thai Numerals Jan 13, 2019

Thai, like many other East Asian languages has its own writing system, but unlike many other writing systems all over the world that do not have distinct symbols for numerals, the Thai system does. The numerals follow a base-ten system with the Arabic numerals, but this should not be surprising since they both followed from the same Hindu origins. However, while not represented in the numeration, the name for the number 1, nèung, changes to become èt when it is at the end of other numbers, like 11, or sìp èt (literally: ten-one).

0: ๐
1:๑
2:๒
3: ๓
4: ๔
5: ๕
6: ๖
7: ๗
8: ๘
9: ๙