What bugs me most is that because of their perfect symmetry, if you turn the paper around, the glyphs are still perfectly legible, just give you the wrong number.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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I bet they scribbled these mostly on the walls of their cells in their Monastery. You'd have to hang upside down from your bunk to misread it.
In all seriousness, wait until you hear that they wrote these horizontally when combined with Latin script.
Not really more convenient tbh. Every large number is a cryptic puzzle you have to solve first.
Actually it seems pretty easy once you learn the patterns. I'm sure if you used it more frequently it would come quickly. For example, modifiers always occupy the same quadrant based on the power. What I mean is if the number is in the thousands, you look at the bottom left of the vertical line. Using this method you only have to look at each of the 4 quadrants of the symbol to know what the full number is. That's not much different than writing out the four digits linearly in our current system.
I can see great advantages to this system back in the days when these symbols may be carved in stone, or before the printing press where everything was handwritten so ink and paper were very expensive.
That's true of our numbering system. It's literally am identical base system, you just need to learn the numerals.
abcd where a is the 1000s place, b is the 100s place, c is the 10s place and d the 1s. In both systems you can immediately interpret any part of the number by looking at that place in the number.
For example in the first example you can parse it easily in any order, the number is 1993, read from top left to bottom right it is literally 90+3+1000+900. Or you can simply read it from BL to TR and it reads 1000+900+90+3.
This system makes sense in the context of saving expensive paper/parchment (as was often extremely valuable, many books have been cleared and written over to save paper throughout history)
Is this loss?
There's so many "iamverysmart" comments in here. Some people need to touch some grass.
6 is 2 symbols though
the "′0"s in the percentage symbol "%" aren't touching the "/". is it one or 3 symbols?
Yes.
It is either one or three symbols.
so 6 is one and two symbols then.
but when you search a tiny bit online you end up reading this
The percent sign % is the symbol used to indicate a percentage, a number or ratio as a fraction of 100.
confusing, there's no right or wrong.
Using the same argument, 10 is one symbol. It is the "ten" symbol.
I’m just pointing out that it makes no sense to say that this system allows writing any number as one symbol.
Look! I invented a much better version that everyone will understand immediately.
94
33
9343? 😜
Look Ma, I've written 4 symbols on top of each other and count it as one symbol. Now I have 9999 different symbols. I'm officially smart now.
I like that a lot of numbers for each power of ten are made by overlapping the previous numbers with one or two. It makes me annoyed though that three is not made by overlapping one and two, because the system would still work. Aside from that it's just a decimal system limited to four digits disguised as a single symbol.
Could be useful to write numbers not in base 10.
For non-tech people is like we write base 16 numbers (hexadeximal):
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F
So 26 would be 1A.
Edit: Does anyone know if these are available in unicode? I can't find them, so I guess not.
doing math with these sounds annoying
how much money i have: |
it buggs me that they don't follow the left to right convention.
SO THAT'S WHERE CHANTS OF SENAAR GOT THAT
Addendum: I fuckin loved so many aspects of playing through that game. If you haven't tried it, a full playthrough is only 5 or 6 hours and it's a really awesome puzzle game experience. Since it's a language discovery game, it plays like a mystery game, which is really fantastic.
Cistercian number superiority tbh, gotta be one of my favourite notations.
I should say as well - it's possible to do numbers higher than 9999 by writing the line horizontally and making it long, and I've heard it was done like that in rare cases but I will not provide sources.