At 16:18 09.02.99 -0800, you wrote:
>
>Something from the Milton listserve (from Rose Williams) for medievalists
>to ponder.
>
>---------- Forwarded message -----
>
>Canterbury, England. A.D. 999.
>
>An atmosphere close to panic prevails today throughout Europe as the
>millennial year 1000 approaches, bringing with it the so-called "Y1K
>Bug," a menace which, until recently, hardly anyone had ever heard of.
>
>Prophets of doom are warning that the entire fabric of Western
>Civilization, based as it now is upon monastic computations, could
>collapse, and that there is simply not enough time left to fix the
>problem.
>
>Just how did this disaster-in-the-making ever arise? Why did no one
>anticipate that a change from a three-digit to a four-digit year would
>throw into total disarray all liturgical chants and all metrical verse
>inwhich any date is mentioned?
>[...]
Dear Michael,
nice idea, and just the right thing to be distributed to Miltonists. We
medievalist of course know that there was no change from a three-digit to a
four-digit-year in AD 999/1000, because the Hindu-Arabic 'digits' were
still taking their time (actually more than two centuries) to come into use
for writing numbers in the West. The Greek numeral for 1000 was the letter
alpha with some diacritical mark (to indicate that the value is 1000 and
not 1; some also used the letter Chi as an abbreviation of the Greek word
for thousand, chilias), whereas the Latin numeral for 1000 was M. Derivates
of the Hindu-Arabic numerals were already in use for naming the counters on
the monastic ('Gerbertian') abacus, but not for writing numbers. If anybody
had cared to represent the year 1000 on such an abacus, he would have
placed a counter with the numeral igin (= one) into the fourth column from
the right:
__ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
\ /si- \ /ce- \ /te- \ /ze- \ /cal-\ /qui-\ /ar- \ /or- \ /an- \ /igin\
| pos |lentis| me- | nis | tis | mas | bas | mis | dras | |
| | | nias | | | | | | | |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| 0 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| IMIm | CMIm | XMIm | MIm | Cm | Xm | Im | C | X | I |
| | | | | | | | | | |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| | | | | | | (1) | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | |
As you see, medieval monks were brighter than Big Blue and had ample space
on their medieval computer for future millenaries to come!
Best,
Otfried
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