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I've seen this a hundred times now and it annoys me every time -- there are still separate digits, they're just attached to a central line. I can invent another way of writing 1-9999 with a "single symbol" too, here we go:
~~0001 0002 0003~~ ... ~~0099 0100~~ ... ~~9998 9999~~
Right but that's still disingenuous toward it, they manage to fit everything in a single glyph, which is of a standard size, and it is more information in a smaller space.
This number system chooses economy of paper over readability.
A good choice in a medieval monastery where parchment is precious and time is plentiful.
A bad choice in modern society.
Readability only seems poor because we're not used to it. It's actually pretty logical and well thought out. The real problem is that the system isn't expandable, so once you get to 10000 you have to get creative.
That's easy, just add a second gliph or more with a line connecting them.
I wonder how easy it is to perform arithmetic with these.
Define glyph
A character
A glyph (/ɡlɪf/ GLIF) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character".
Courtesy of Wikipedia (emphasis mine)
You missed the point. One’s own may never have to leave the page. But should one?
Cistercian dick jokes: 9933
Don't be a 9933!
And upside down is 3399.
Reversing certain patterns has interesting impact on the glyph.
Aaand TTD (time to dick (time until the inevitable happens, someone eventually draws a dick)) is some 1,5 hours.
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.
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.
Look! I invented a much better version that everyone will understand immediately.
94
33
9343? 😜
There's so many "iamverysmart" comments in here. Some people need to touch some grass.
...I honestly don't know what to say. This is really, really cool. And intuitive enough. And boy, did they have a lot of time on their hands. 😆
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.
6 is 2 symbols though
the "′0"s in the percentage symbol "%" aren't touching the "/". is it one or 3 symbols?
Or the question mark, exclamation mark, etc.
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.
doing math with these sounds annoying
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.
Unicode has so many symbols, I’m a bit surprised these aren’t there.
I dig it. Seems it would be more logical to swap the 1000s and 100s so that each power of 10 is a single rotation (or translation of the small line if you view it that way). Between 10 / 100 there’s 2 rotations but between 1 / 10 and 100 / 1000 there’s only one
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.
Concerned that rarely used symbols would be easily forgotten, while every Arabic numerals can be used frequently.
But there's only 9 symbols, they just combine on top of each other instead of sequentially.
These are used for a number of puzzles in the game The Last Case of Benedict Fox. It's all based around the occult and a pretty decent game.
how much money i have: |
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.
Reminds me of the writing system in Digimon
it buggs me that they don't follow the left to right convention.
They kinda do. To read the numbers you look bottom left, bottom right, top left, top right. There will either be a line in each quadrant to indicate the digit or not. I don't particularly like the bottom to top convention, but I guess it make more sense to have the information at the top for the more every day life one and two digit numbers.
Seems rather wasteful at first glance, I can't imagine the 100 and 1000 digits changing too often. Do we know what they usually counted with it?