Using "IIII" instead of "IV" isn't even necessarily wrong. Rome was a big empire with a widely-distributed populace that lasted for a thousand years. The usage of numerals changed over time and according to context:

"While subtractive notation for 4, 40 and 400 (IV, XL and CD) has been the usual form since Roman times, additive notation to represent these numbers (IIII, XXXX and CCCC)[9] continued to be used, including in compound numbers like 24 (XXIIII),[10] 74 (LXXIIII),[11] and 490 (CCCCLXXXX).[12] The additive forms for 9, 90, and 900 (VIIII,[9] LXXXX,[13] and DCCCC[14]) have also been used, although less often. The two conventions could be mixed in the same document or inscription, even in the same numeral. For example, on the numbered gates to the Colosseum, IIII is systematically used instead of IV, but subtractive notation is used for XL; consequently, gate 44 is labelled XLIIII."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Origin

As for clock faces, the explanation that I always heard was that it simplified the manufacturing process to use IIII rather than IV; something about making better use of materials to have one fewer V and one more I.

In terms of "empires" that were founded, its crazy how young our modern societies are compared to Rome.

Cleopatra was a Macedonian Greek, descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals. Alexander had conquered Egypt about 3 centuries earlier...taking it from the Persians, who had previously conquered the final "native" XXX Dynasty...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_Kingdom

And giving Egypt's foreign conqueror the title "Pharaoh", if only for domestic consumption, persisted for centuries after Cleopatra:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_pharaoh

Though Rome's appointed provincial governors mostly didn't care if the locals called them "Pharaoh".

> Let’s start with languages, because I think this fact can be presented in a somewhat distorted way. The language of the Ptolemaic court was Greek, initially Macedonian Greek (the Macedonians had a pronounced accent), though Plutarch notes that some of the later Ptolemies had lost their Macedonian accent (Plut. Ant. 27.3-4). Cleopatra, by contrast, was the first of the Ptolemies to bother to learn Egyptian (which should tell you something about the character of Ptolemaic rule; imagine if King Charles was the first English king since George I and kings from the House of Hanover to bother to learn English). The problem with this fact is that it is incomplete, presenting Cleopatra as a Greek-speaker who learned the language of her people out of sincere devotion, but that’s not what Plutarch says. Plutarch says:

>> She could turn [her voice] easily to whichever language she wished and she conversed with few barbarians entirely through an interpreter, and she gave her decisions herself to most of them, including Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes and Parthians. She is said to have learned the languages of many others also, although the kings before her did not undertake to learn the Egyptian language, even though some of them had abandoned the Macedonian dialect.16

> So let’s unpack that. This isn’t a native speaker of Greek who learned just the language of her subjects, but a spectacularly skilled linguist who learned a lot of different languages, quite regardless of if she ruled the people in question. Running through the list, she evidently learned Ethiopian, the language of the people on her southern border, the speech of the Troglodytae, the people who lived on the coast of the Red Sea (a hinterland of her kingdom). The ‘language of the Hebrews’ here is probably Aramaic rather than Hebrew (which would also cover much of Syria), while the language of the Medes and Parthians might mean both Old Persian and the Parthian language. To which we must add Egyptian, implied by that last sentence; it also seems fairly clear Cleopatra knew at least some Latin.17 This is part of why I find arguments that use Cleopatra’s knowledge of Egyptian as strong proof either for her Egyptian ancestry or deep attachment to Egypt less than fully compelling; she was surely not Parthian and did not have a deep attachment to Parthia, but she learned their language too. Again, there’s not nothing here, but it’s not a slam dunk either.

SO - literally truth that she learned Egyptian. But extremely sketchy to extrapolate from that fact to any sort of "she cared more about her subjects" conclusion.

After the invasion of England by William the court spoke French for hundreds of years. I don’t know if or when they learnt English.

From accounts by professional ancient historians, that "fact" may mostly be PR spin and "rule of cool" myth. For instance:

https://acoup.blog/2023/05/26/collections-on-the-reign-of-cl...

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Shire_Calendar

Even now 29 Feb shouldn't exist, it should just be "leap day" and have no numerical significance.

Screw the computers, they can learn to adapt.

Of course those days would be very hectic travel wise if the entire population of earth were to migrate around on those days.

And on other hand the clerks had enough time to make writing system really hard to learn so such thing would make things even better for them...

Truly boggles the mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sultans_of_the_Ottoman...

> After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II, Ottoman sultans came to regard themselves as the successors of the Roman Empire, hence their occasional use of the titles caesar (قیصر qayser) of Rûm, and emperor, as well as the caliph of Islam.

A more direct name claim would be

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Rum

which lasted until 1308.

A different later tradition of claiming to be the Roman emperor is the Holy Roman Empire's

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire

which used that term after a break of several centuries (so not very continuously with the ancient Roman Empire). But Germans then claimed to be Roman emperors (in some sense) until 1806!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor

These aren't as continuous with the ancient Roman empire as the Byzantines, but it's still pretty astonishing to think that various monarchs were still claiming to be (in at least a theoretical legal sense) Roman emperors during the 1800s and 1900s.

So you are right that WWI can be argued to the real end of the Roman Empire!!!

One of these days I am going to a series on “When did the Roman Empire End?” Currently, I have at least 10 plausible dates/events. It turns out to be a very interesting overview of a lot of events and characters in Western History.

Yep. "Czar" = "Caesar". Likewise "Kaiser" in the Germanic regions.

The British monarch was called "Kaisar-i-Hind" by Hindi-speaking people, when the subcontinent was controlled by the British.

https://youtu.be/j-KxS3L9bcM

Hmm but India has existed in the form of multiple state entities that changed every hundred years or so for much longer than the 1k years.

The Roman empire was also fragmented before its creation, and after. Look at how many Italian states divided the peninsula before the 19th century.

Our modern notion of "country" is only a couple hundred years old.

The Roman empire was the most unified state entity for a millenium. But their idea of unified was different from ours.

Many countries have an 'origin story' which implies that they are the same thing as random countries or regions which had similar names/languages/locations but in the vast majority cases these are something between a loose approximation and a myth.

During the Yugoslav period, there was a minority group of Bulgarian migrants in one region of Yugoslavia. Like most linguistic groups they adopted the national language and believed themselves to be Yugoslav. However their group was sometimes referred to as 'Macedonian' because the corner of Yugoslavia near Bulgaria is also near Macedonia in Greece. They now have their own country (and language - whose only differences from Serbo-Croat are those which were intentionally introduced), and many believe themselves to be the descendants and cultural and spiritual heirs of Alexander the Great (even though Alexander reigned over and left an influence over a region bigger than Europe).

All countries have things like this in their history. It's just that generally they are a few hundred years further away.

Most people living in what is now France would have spoken other languages than French well past the time of the Frankish people.

Literally all over Europe, and a lot of the world, people have trees at Christmas.

Wow, this is... biased. Sincerely, a Macedonian.

People living in Macedonia (or, to avoid confusion, sigh... North Macedonia), have at one point (and even today, by some), yes, been called Bulgarians, but we've also been called Serbs and Greeks (in northern Greece, since Greece claims that everyone in Greece is Greek, lol). So, you claiming that we have only been Bulgarians, who, judging by the tone of your comment, got brainwashed into thinking we're Yugoslavs and after that Macedonians is absurd, to say the least.

Serbs tried to make us Serbs before Bulgarians tried to make us Bulgarian, and they too failed. You can't make up an entire nation in a top-down manner, the people living in those lands first have to show signs that they consider themselves as a separate nation from the rest in any given region, which the Macedonians have, time and again.

Now, to be fair to Serbs, there's a lot of Serbian cultural influence here, and a lot of people here do understand Serbian more than Bulgarian (even though Bulgarian and Macedonian are, on paper, more similar than Serbian and Macedonian), but still, they failed in trying to convince us to be Serbian rather than what we are now, a separate nation, Macedonian.

Also, the modern idea of a separate, sovereign Macedonian state for the Macedonian nation has existed since at least 1880*

> (and language - whose only differences from Serbo-Croat are those which were intentionally introduced)

1. And this is how I know you're not a Bulgarian because a true Bulgarian nationalist would claim that Macedonian is not its own language, but that it's only a dialect of Bulgarian.

2. There are a lot of differences on paper from Serbo-Croatian. It's closer to Bulgarian. Still, you don't create a language in a top-down manner. Read "Za makedonckite raboti" by Krste Petkov Misirkov.

> and many believe themselves to be the descendants and cultural and spiritual heirs of Alexander the Great (even though Alexander reigned over and left an influence over a region bigger than Europe).

Not sure how true this is. There are some definitely, but I feel they're more of a very loud minority, or at least not the majority by a long shot. Anybody who is seriously claiming they're direct descendants of some guy who lived over 2 thousand years ago, and completely forgetting about everyone that has walked and mixed in that region between then and now (think of all the Greeks, Romans, Slavs, Jews, Ottomans, and everybody else I'm not mentioning) is to have his mental faculties questioned. This goes not only for my fellow denizens, but for anybody claiming such a historical connection to a long-lost civilization, and especially so for those who are geographically not related (I could name names, but that would further diverge this conversation.) But at the same time to claim that people living in present-day Macedonia (the entire region, not just the state) have no connection whatsoever, is, as well, stupid.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assembly_of_Macedonia... * https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:A_Manifesto_from_...

This is interesting to me. What does it mean for a country to exist non-continuously? I can understand making the case under some sort of continuity despite dramatic changes in e.g. control of land or type of government. Sort of like a nation-state Ship of Theseus.

But I don't understand how this works under the non-continuous case. If the temporal connection is broken how is it the same entity?

It was more about who controls what. Doesn't mean the actual population of the controlled areas changed much.

To give an example from my country's history, Romania has been divided into 3 provinces until very recent (historically speaking) times.

The first unification happened in 1600 when Michael the Brave, the king of the southernmost province, managed to take control of all 3 for about a year. He didn't proclaim himself king of Romania, he called himself king of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania.

100-150 years earlier, Stephen the Great, the king of Moldavia hit Wallachia militarily several times during his reign... not to conquer it and unify but to place a king friendly to him on the throne.

Pretty sure you can find examples like this in any country's history. Germany and Italy for sure, since they've been divided politically into smaller provinces for a thousand years.

Compare the borders of something like the Duchy of Bohemia and the modern-day Czech Republic. That's two states over a thousand years apart, separated by centuries of highs and lows, including uncountable foreign invasions and Austrian rule for four centuries. And yet there's something obviously parallel to them - states ruled from Prague, inhabited largely by Czech speakers, extending to virtually the same territory.

Europe's natural and linguistic borders are relatively stable, so the emergence of similar states over similar territories in time is not unexpected.

This is the sort of thing that’s true, but only if you don’t think about it deeply. People in England definitely spoke English, but that doesn’t mean that we would be able to understand them. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote one of the first major works of literature in English, but 99.9% of Englishmen alive today wouldn’t be able to understand a word of it because of how much English has changed.

> In Gernade at the sege eek hadde he be Of Algezir, and riden in Belmarye. At Lyeys was he, and at Satalye, Whan they were wonne; and in the Grete See At many a noble aryve hadde he be.

This book needs to be translated into English for us to understand it, despite it being written in an older form of English.

And obviously, English isn’t a special case. Every language has evolved over time, to the point where it’s nearly impossible to understand a few hundred years later. So sure, we think the people who lived in this city a few hundred years ago are our countrymen, but realistically we wouldn’t be able to speak a word to each other.

I have a linguistics degree and a passion for historical linguistics that will result in me talking your ear off about Indo-European ablaut, so this is probably the first time in my life I've ever been accused of failing to think deeply about language variation / change!

But I do agree with tsunamifury's comment - what you say is interesting, but rather beside the point. What's relevant is a sense of continuity, not whether the modern speakers would understand the original language or not. (I'm unsure why the latter would be relevant at all?) As Benedict Anderson has argued, a nation is above all an imagined community, so what's relevant is that Czech speakers picture a sense of continuity with the speakers of Slavic dialects in 1000 AD, and not with - say - the speakers of Celtic or Germanic dialects spoken at the same time.

(It's worth noting that your example is fairly unrepresentative, by the by. English is a language with an unusually high rate of change (though I'm surprised you went with Chaucer, which many educated English speakers can largely follow, and not something like Beowulf, which no English speaker could understand without training). It's also worth noting that the Slavic languages are languages with an unusually low rate of change, so a text as old as Chaucer would be relatively much easier for Czech speakers to read.)

I meant to say that this idea that the people 1000 years ago being “my people” doesn’t hold up to close inspection. There is no continuity in a meaningful sense if you can’t communicate with them, wouldn’t agree with them on anything even if we could, and couldn’t even find a common activity to do together. They’d be about as alien as a green man from Mars. But it doesn’t matter, because you’re not going to convince people to stop idealising ancestors.

Not every language changes at the rate English does.

I think what you're saying is absolutely true, and a better example would be culture in general. There's a certain continuity in the cultural practices of a people in a certain region, with religion being one of the most resilient... but also other things like food, music and, of course, language.

However, all of those change over time. It's funny for me that the Americans of today would almost certainly consider the Americans of the 1950's a bunch of racists and homophobes. A culture can change over time so much as to be more different in 75 years than when actually compared with that of other countries. The continuity exists but change can be very fast. Look at the culture of any European "country" and you'll see just how much change happens. An extreme example, perhaps: the Swedes of the year 1000 compared with the Swedes of 2000. The people inhabiting what we call Sweden today were Vikings back then. I don't believe they had a concept of Sweden yet, as a country, though the regions around Stockholm (which didn't exist yet) and Uppsala (a small region which later grew far North and South to form Sweden proper) seem to have already had a sort of cultural identity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians). These people were raiders and conquerors - they may have founded the Kievan Rus state and served as elite guards in the Byzantine Empire, which shows just how much of a bad ass warriors they were. How does present-day liberal, tolerant and egalitarian Swedes relate to their ancestors? If they could meet today, the modern fella would lose their head in no time, literally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxOSqSUgNzE

That is true for Beowulf, but not for Chaucer. If you just read the words in Chaucer, pronouncing them exactly as you would if your were sounding them out, you will be able to understand pretty much the entire thing after at most a few hours practice.

We did this in my freshman English class and it was a lot of fun.

More like two polities which share a capital city, but barely have either a language or a geography in common. The idea that Bohemia is essentially Czechia has no more reliable historical basis than belief that it belongs to Greater Germany, or to Czechoslovakia.

(Note: there was technically the government-in-exile in London, which you could argue maintained continuity, but I don't think it's necessary so I'm leaving that out of this.)

Tribalism?

The only continuity was in the collective mind of people who identified as Polish and grabbed the opportunity to fight and (re-)establish their own country.

Now if you look at the continuity of ideas, it gets pretty philosophical so we could leave it to philosophers... if it wasn't for the fact that people use the ideas to justify wars. I don't have a confident answer for continuity between "being Polish in 1795" and "being Polish in 1918".

There's still a cultural identity in these places. The people living in them weren't replaced or relocated, primarily the flag and regent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussia

What does "country" means? State? Geography? Leadership? Ancestry? People?

If you get far back enough the birth of France starts with Gaul which bears more than a passing resemblance with today's France:

https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/3044d40d-8af2-47aa-81e5-785...

And around 50BC with Vercingétorix surrendering to the Romans at Alésia the tide turns and it gets administratively split up largely to ensure they don't come together as a force against the Roman Empire again. Then as the Roman Empire starts showing cracks, various local powers emerge again:

https://www.alex-bernardini.fr/histoire/images/division-gaul...

Then "France" itself starts to exist since Clovis I united Franks in 481 and around 511 looks somewhat the same as today again if you squint hard enough:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fb/3b/79/fb3b7985c2063f6a9839c6918...

But then in 840 it gets split in three after infighting among Charlemagne grandchildren, tearing the whole thing apart again:

https://www.lhistoire.fr/sites/lhistoire.fr/files/img_portfo...

Middle one's fate is to dwindle, west one will become France, right one will become Germany.

France's shape will then vary a lot through time, alliances, weddings, and battles, sometimes eaten at on the east, west, north, south, but more or less gravitating around the center part.

But then here comes Prussia in 1870, then WW1, then WW2, culminating in the partial occupation then administration of northern and western France between 1940-42 and a literal fork of France leadership and government: France de Vichy led by Pétain in the south east, France Libre led by De Gaulle exiled in London. In theory the Vichy government was also leading occupied the north of France but in practice it was ruled by Germany.

1942 comes and Germany resolves the conundrum by forcefully merging south with north, France de Vichy becomes devoid of any power (not that it had much before, being a satellite state of Germany), France is de facto a part of Germany, essentially leaving only France Libre as an actual French government, which is not even in any part of the territory!

So again, what does "country" means? State? Geography? Leadership? Ancestry? People? There's definitely some ship of Theseus going on along these 2k years, as well as forks, takeovers, infighting, and whatnot. This abridged version only highlights so much as there's much more intricacy to it, reality is incredibly messy, yet somehow "France" going all the way back to Gaul over 2k years carries some sense.

If it was always a country, then go west. When Eric the Red founded Greenland, was it a European country? Did it become a country? After the Norse died, the Danish-Norwegians still claimed sovereignty, and reestablished a colony. The place is now a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark.

But you’re right in the broader sense, that Indian people feel that India has been around for longer even if it hasn’t. That is arguably more important to keeping the nation together than anything else.

Now depending how you're counting, and your definition of empire the Roman empire had a continuous history (with radical transformations over time but nevertheless continuous) for 2000 years.

But hey, it all depends on how you define things. Undoubtedly the Indian subcontinent produced an incredibly deep and rich cultural history that spanned thousands of years.

It was just slightly more fractured and dynamic. The Romans objectively held their firm (and often brutal) hold on a lot of land for a lot of time with a continuous identity, in a way that is not just to say that the same common culture continued on across various political arrangements that changed over time. Because I'd that's what we're talking about we could say that the whole of Europe has a kind of cultural union (fostered by the shared religion) that continued on till today.

But the details of how you define things matter of course. Today you wouldn't consider the byzantine empire to be the Roman empire, but ask somebody from the 1300s living somewhere in the aegean see or anatolia and they will tell you they were Romans.

What is the "Indian Empire"? The Mughal Empire? That lasted like 300 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation

Not locations.

The Wikipedia citation for 9 is Commentarii de bello Gallico (Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War), which interestingly comes from around the same timeframe (first century BC, toward the end of the Roman Republic).

this is not for modern manufacturing of millions, it's for one at a time clockmaking in a little shop, for which it's a pretty efficient way to accomplish the task and doesn't require keeping an inventory

To be a bit more explicit, you use the the die four (4) times, and get 4 Xs, 4 Vs, and 4*IIIII = 20 Is, which is exactly right for I II III IIII V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII. Using IV would mean a 5 Vs, but only 4 Xs, and 17 Is, so you couldn't cut a full set with a single die without using a much larger die (= more work making and using the die) or having extra pieces (= wasted material) left over.

An improvement would be IXIVIII actually, then all combinations can be located in that string.

You rotate XI 180 degrees.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Capitali...

ah nvadr spells it out:

VIIIIX

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39722131

VIIIIX

For each clock, you make 4 of these, and split each block into numbers the following way:

V IIII I X

VI III IX (mirror the IX for 11)

VII II IX

VIII IIX

This lets you mass produce watch numbers with a minimum of wasted material.

Also 12 needs to be mirrored I think.

Otherwise lgtm.

"Somebody thought IV was not easily understandable because it resembled VI..." (in paragraph 2)

So why use a numeral at all? Well, there's always those people who will think that it is obviously wrong not to have numbers on a measuring instrument. Also, in early modern times, clocks were expensive items and expected to be ornate, especially as they were not all that good at keeping time.

Thinking about it though. It sort of is cultural/historical trivia. How many hours do you spend in school drilling how Roman numerals are constructed rather than teaching something else. I suppose it's nice enough for those who encounter them when traveling. But pretty far on the not-essential end of the axis.

But I'd say maybe not waste too much time on it. Kids will play with whatever they play with, you can lead them to water but cannot make them drink. We just happened to enjoy playing with number systems, and it helped a lot that our school introduced us to several for us to play with initially.

We do base twelve in our household. It's easier to hold in my head than base thirty-six.

Edit: I was halfway joking but I'm noticing that the 12-hour clock is very elegantly conveyed using base-36 hand gestures. The "hands" of the clock bring in this case literal human hands.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senary#Finger_counting

The only really bad thing about Roman numerals is non-positionality, and it kinda follows naturally from them being merely transcriptions of the states of the 5+2-beads abacus that was popular back then. If only the norm back then were the 10-beads abacus... alas, the history is what it is.

Verbally, the system seems to go thousand -> lakh -> crore -> thousand crore -> lakh crore, but then stop there, rarely extending to crore crore or inducting any farther.

Meanwhile commas don't seem to follow the verbal convention - instead showing up every two digits even after a crore, so a thousand crore looks more like ten hundred crore, and a lakh crore looks more like ten hundred hundred crore.

Most people don't deal in these numbers, beyond the crores. And in sciences, exponential notation is norm anyway.

There's no way it is as messy as Roman numerals.

    © BBC MCMXCVI

    © BBC MM

    © BBC MMXXIV

The last time I even saw a clock face with Roman numerals, it was when clearing the house of a person who had died.

The HHGTTG in the 1980s was sarcastic about digital watches being thought a pretty neat idea by humans, but they have definitely caught on. I have three clocks within view right now as I type this, one on an answer 'phone, and they are all digital readouts. None of them has an analogue option.

Fun fact: The pseudish BBC copyright declaration system did not begin until the middle 1970s. Before then, copyright years were in Indian numerals. In contrast to all of the earlier discussion on this page about the age and length of the Roman Empire, this particular practice post-dates the U.K.'s accession into the EEC and the U.K.'s conversion to decimal coinage.

Another fun fact: It isn't solely the BBC, in fairness. ITV companies did this back then, too. Granada's Crown Court has Roman numerals in the copyright year in its end credits, for just one example.

   GRANADA
   Colour Production
   © Granada UK MCMLXXVIII

That said I have a bunch of analog clocks around my flat, and zero digital ones. It's actually been kinda fun watching our child learn to tell the time:

With an analog clock he pretty quickly understood the idea that one rotation of the seconds-hand meant a minute moved, and when the minute hand went all the way round the clock it was another hour.

But digital time? He didn't understand how something went from 19:59 to 20:00, for example. So he'd always say "Daddy what the clock is?"

(Finnish is is native tongue, he speaks to me in English, but some of the phrasing is obviously "I translated this in my head".)

I admit I've used the rotating bezel of a diving-watch to time cooking more often than for timing dives. They're very practical for that!

It is at least simple to have an analogue clock face on iPhones, albeit with a digital one too - can't resist sharing screenshot considering what my next calendar appointment happens to be... https://i.ibb.co/0JgJL0p/IMG-3479.jpg (no it doesn't take 15 minutes, but is needed once a week - it's a very old clock.)

In her opinion it's probably partly related to Covid too because although they do still teach it in school (at least here in the UK), there's a cohort of kids who missed a lot of basic stuff like this during lockdowns. So I think here in the UK kids around the age of 11-12 really struggle with this specifically because roman numerals and analogue clocks is something they typically would learn around the age of 7-8.

I'd be surprised if that was the reason, but it's kind of neat.

I II III IIII

V VI VII VIII

IX X XI XII

⸻

1. The Hebrew numeral system, like the Greek numeral system is an almost-decimal system in that different letters are used for each of the different values, but the letters change by place value as well as by their individual value, so, e.g., 21 is written כא where כ stands for 20 and א stands for 1.

אבגדהוזחט - count one through nine

יכלמנסעפצ - count ten through ninety

קרשת - count one hundred through four hundred

so תו would be 406 while טו is 9+6=15

On the other hand, they had semi-standard numerals for all sorts of odd fractions like 1⁄288 = ℈.

Then we went home and noticed all the clocks in the house had IIII.

It’s easy to forget how hard it is to standardise a large populous given everything these days can be shared at near-to-light-speed but even today you have regional slang. Terms that might be common in the north of a country but alien to southerners.

So I find it entirely believable that there were multiple “standards” for Roman numerals that spanned different regions and periods of time.

That indeed seems to be the case. Apparently it largely standardized at some point in the Middle Ages as usage was decreasing. Although I can't find a reference, it's logical to assume given the timeframe and place that the Church probably had something to do with the standardization whether formally or otherwise.

That said, I always go with Arabic numerals, so it's a moot point for me, practically speaking.

I think you're focusing on the wrong thing here. If it hadn't been Roman numerals it would have been something else.

Teachers are much the same as cops. Some go into those fields because they genuinely want to help people. Other go into them because they enjoy having power.

Maybe it was The Seventh Guest? Or Myst?

(Ok, that originated from the sequel, but it's still canonical to the universe.)

This contradicts examples that Wikipedia has of subtractive notation during the height of the Roman Empire (though it's not clear to me when "IV" became the accepted standard form).

The reason of "IIII" is of usability for clocks that can be seen from different angles. Six can only be written as "VI" so "IV" is changed to "IIII" to prevent confusion.

Of course there are all kind of urban legends and fake stories of kings requesting the number be written this or that way.

In case someone doesn't know, a fun fact: "I" is one finger, "V" represent the open hand (think pinky and thumb in angle) and "X" both open hands united. So 1, 5, 10.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201115002205/https://www.washi...

For example, Adolf Hitler's grandfather was called Hiedler, not Hitler and the spelling change was the result of his father's name, Alois Hitler, being changed later in his life after first being recorded as Aloys Schicklgruber (the family name being that of his mother rather than father as the fatherhood was apparently initially contested).

Or for orthography you just need to look at any historical text pre-19th century or so and you'll find plenty of oddities that often change regionally or even between writers in the same region.

Now expand this to the time scale and area of the Roman Empire/Republic and it's amazing most of it was somehow coherent over time. Actually as far as I recall, the "subtractive" style was only used consistently in the Middle Ages. Another odd variant I've seen is "IIX" instead of "VIII". And let's not talk about how larger numbers were represented or shenanigans like the "long I" instead of "II".

I didn't realize the subtractive style really dates to the middle ages, but that certainly seems consistent with the coins - I checked a bunch more and none seem to use it.

edit: sometimes I wonder if arithmetic arose simply from naming numbers

And it is more like our current number system arose because it makes arithmetic so much simpler.

The first time I went abroad, I was in a wine caveau and paying the teller. When she said the price, my mind went blank -- pitch black. She said "five" impatiently in every language I spoke -- even latin -- and I kept wondering, yes, but what and five?

Here is the uneditorialized headline. Especially it is called dial plate, not clock face.

Has someone been to this place? Is it worth a visit?

You'd think it would be easier to remember given that I had to change it less than a week ago.

When I was 14 my grandmother died we got an old clock and it showed IIII. I came to the conclusion it's a poor piece of craftsmanship, the clockmaker just did not know math. Otherwise clocks with Roman numbers were not common at all where I lived.

The old clock is still in my living room over 40 years later (not in a prominent place, I don't find it impressive anymore like I did when I was younger). When reading this I notice that numbers on the lower half are upside down. Had not paid attention to this for over 40 years.

Justin Bieber has his mothers birth year tattooed on his chest:

I IX VII V

instead of:

MCMLXXV