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.
Cistercian dick jokes: 9933
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.
Is this loss?
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.
That’s true of our numbering system. It’s literally am identical base system, you just need to learn the numerals.
abcd where a is the 1000s place, b is the 100s place, c is the 10s place and d the 1s. In both systems you can immediately interpret any part of the number by looking at that place in the number.
For example in the first example you can parse it easily in any order, the number is 1993, read from top left to bottom right it is literally 90+3+1000+900. Or you can simply read it from BL to TR and it reads 1000+900+90+3.
This system makes sense in the context of saving expensive paper/parchment (as was often extremely valuable, many books have been cleared and written over to save paper throughout history)
