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.
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.
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.
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?
Sadly, that civilization has perished in the last 100 years.
Still, Australians are teaching the languages in their schools now. Finally. We might still yet hear a whisper...
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.
What is the "Indian Empire"? The Mughal Empire? That lasted like 300 years.
Not locations.
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.
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).
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.
if the device is upside down it is evident and I don’t even try to read it, I right the clock or take off and restrap the watch.
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.
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.
© BBC MCMXCVI
© BBC MM
© BBC MMXXIVThe 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⸻
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
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
On the other hand, they had semi-standard numerals for all sorts of odd fractions like 1⁄288 = ℈.
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.
Then we went home and noticed all the clocks in the house had IIII.
That said, I always go with Arabic numerals, so it's a moot point for me, practically speaking.
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).
Maybe it was The Seventh Guest? Or Myst?
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.
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.
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.
As for the Hitler one: he just happens to be a widely known person with a family name that changed not so long ago. Plus I actually first learned this from someone joking about whether he'd have been as successful if his father had never changed his name from Schicklgruber. Fun fact: "Hitler" was officially supposed to be pronounced with a long "i" (ee) like Hiedler but apparently Hitler didn't like this pronunciation and suppressed it once in power.
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?
You'd think it would be easier to remember given that I had to change it less than a week ago.
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?
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.
Doc Brown can’t be wrong:
https://clickamericana.com/wp-content/uploads/Back-to-the-Fu...
IIIIV IIIV IIV IV V VI VII VIII VIIII
