1 Jun
2010
1 Jun
'10
12:32 p.m.
From: Chuck Guzis
Sent: Sunday, May 30, 2010 6:04 PM
On 31 May 2010 at 1:27, Andrew Burton wrote:
> I was thinking that Roman Numerals was the first
time (I knew of)
> numbers being represented by letters, and that would have influenced
> whoever thought up the sexadecimal system (I can't find any reference
> to them on wiki - I'm sure it used to be there). Perhaps I was wrong.
Is Andrew thinking of the sexagesimal (base 60) system? That arose in
Mesopotamia a millennium or more prior to the Romans.
You may be thinking of the way the ancient Greeks
represented
numbers. (there were at least two systems--one similar to the Roman
and the other using letters for 1-9, 10-90, 100-900, with special
modifiers for 1000-9000. After that the modifier for a myriad
(10,000, quite literally) was used with each letter.)
Which the Greeks inherited in turn from the Phoenicians; ancient Hebrew
also used such a system.
The origin of the numeral system in Greek is in fact earlier than some of
the changes leading from the late Bronze Age dialects to the classical
ones: The letters wau (later called "digamma" for its shape F, when the
sound was long lost in all Greek dialects), qoppa, and sampi were used for
"6", "90", and "900" respectively. The Semitic languages
from whom this
system was borrowed had (have) more than one s-like sound, and two k-like
sounds; Greek mixed the names of some of the Phoenician letters to yield
the names sigma and san (the "lunate sigma" used in some inscriptions and
manuscripts).
Note that the Indo-European linguistic ancestors of the Greeks, Romans,
etc., used a decimal counting system which some daughter groups tweaked.
(The Germanic group, for example, partially adopted a 12-based system on
top of the decimal, naming the next values after "10" as "one-left"
and
"two-left".)
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/