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At 06:09 PM 11/23/99 +0000, Bill East wrote: >Probably the reason is that Roman numerals, esp. in >> their medieval versions, e.g. xx with iv written above for 80, do >> something that Indian/Arabic ones don't, which is to follow >> contemporary speech patterns (4 score; 500 less 3; one hundred >> and thirty four or whatever). > >I would have thought that Arabic numerals had a very simple and >transparent way of writing one hundred and thirty four, namely 134. >Much more in tune with speech patterns than cxxxiv. > >Oriens. > I suggest that what you say, Bill, is true today, but aren't you overlooking changes in speech patterns? As a mathematician, I came to appreciate some time ago that positional notation (as it's called) of the sort used in referring to a number by the numeral 134 rather than cxxxiv took some ingenuity, involving many years of work and development by many people, and that it took even more years for this method to spread into more general public use. The widespread use of positional notation, using so-called Hindu-Arabic digits (represented by the individual numerals 1,3 and 4), appears to have only begun to spread in Europe in the quite late Middle Ages, or one might even say the early Renaissance, because of the interest taken in them by commercial people. (It's interesting to me to note a kind of pun on the word "interest" here -- one can compare official attitudes of the Roman Catholic Church toward usury with the desire of embryonic Christian capitalists to lend and borrow with interest rates attached.) There is another thing that can be considered in connection with the use of Roman numerals in the European Middle Ages. Commercial people often relied on the use of abacuses, which rely on a kind of built-in positional representation of numbers, without using an explicit notation or names for the numbers, i.e., no written or even spoken numerals are involved. Also, for everyday transactions, various kinds of so-called finger-counting were in widespread use, which similarly don't require explicit use of names for numbers. Gordon Fisher [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%