Re: Numbers ancient & modern (was: Unilang report)
| From: | Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, May 24, 2001, 4:52 |
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At 11:03 am +0200 23/5/01, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
[snip]
>
>In Latin, the two units before round numbers were always counted by
>subtraction,
>so:
>18: duodeviginti (two from twenty)
>19: undeviginti (one from twenty)
>29: undetriginta (one from thirty)
>98: duodecentum (two from one hundred)
>99: undecentum (one from one hundred)
>
>I think that's the origin of the strange system used with Roman numbers :) .
Quite right.
Inscriptions on tombstones show forms like IIXX = eighteen; IXXX = 29,
reflecting what was actually said.
That's too messy for us moderns, so we've come with things like IV and IX,
which the Romans wrote as IIII and VIIII and extended that system.
Ray.
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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
[J.G. Hamann 1760]
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