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Roman Numerals

threesixty360.wordpress.com

20 pointsjohndcook10 comments

IIII persists on clocks. 7 of the 8 roman numeral clock faces I found in the house just now use IIII.

Unicode does not sanction it. There are unicode codes for digits 1 through 12, plus L, C, D, and M, but all my "ROMAN NUMERAL FOUR" (0x2163) are rendered as IV.

That is not an unicode issue. Unicode does not prescribe anything about glyphs. A font could choose to render 0x2163 as IIII or have a character variant for it that did, if it wanted to.

1999 would be MDCCCCLXXXXVIIII under the subtraction-less method. Ouch. Though it still ends up as MCMXCIX doing it the "proper" way despite IM being a cute workaround ;-)

Related - I've searched for an authoritative voice on why the letter 'V' was used in place of 'U'. Does anyone know? I do like the story about U with its round curves being too hard to chisel, and I've not found anything besides opinion and speculation out there.

As far as I know, the story about V being easier to carve in stone is accurate. Also, there is no U in the Roman alphabet. So there's that.

V is certainly easier to carve, but since U didn't exist, it's not like anybody really had to choose.

I do like the story about U with its round curves being too hard to chisel

I find this hard to believe when I see other characters that have have tighter curves having been chiseled in stone. Is it true that there are no/few curves in chiseled letters in classic works? The only ones I've seen are in modern buildings, as in PVLIC LIBRARY.

There's also no J. U/V and I/J were simply the same letter, and could be either vowel or consonant, much like Y. Today, we transcribe it as Julius, but it was written Iulius 2000 years ago.

There are plenty of round Roman letters carved into stone and coins. See image. They didn't use U because they didn't know they "needed" it.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grabmal_des_Iulius_Ba...

Er, that would be more like IVLIVS in real Latin. duh.

You can still find IIII on many grandfather clocks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IIII#IIII_and_IV

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