Re: Q is a Roman numeral?
On Jan 8, 2013 1:08 PM, Frédéric Grosshans wrote: Roman numerals have always been more complex than the standard (modern) way we've been taught to, and their use spans several millennia, over which may variation have occurred. If you look at wiipedia's table for middle age and Renaissance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numeral#Middle_Ages.2FRenaissance , you'll see that many letters of the alphabet have been used as Roman numerals. In this table, Q is supposed to stand for 500, but this is not necessarily in contradiction with 500,000, since there were several ways to go beyond 1000... Actually, page 417 of Capelli's Lexicon Abbreviaturarum [http://inkunabeln.ub.uni-koeln.de/vdibProduction/handapparat/nachs_w/cappelli/capp478.html] seems to explain the 500 vs. 500,000 discrepancy for Q; namely that a standard Q is given for 500, and a Q with an elongated tail is given for 500,000. I did know of the many letters used as Roman numerals in the middle ages, but the excerpt from Gordon only discusses what one could call the core set of Roman numerals: I, V, X, L, C, Đ, a symbol for 1,000 not pictured in the excerpt, and ↅ (which I understand was common at some time). Q definitely stands apart from the rest of that set to me, because I can't imagine that its use for 500,000 was anywhere as common as the others. —Ben Scarborough
Re: Q is a Roman numeral?
Le 08/01/2013 01:26, Ben Scarborough a écrit : This isn't directly related to Unicode, but I thought this would be a good place to ask. Specifically, I'm curious about figure 14 (Gordon 1982) from WG2 N3218 [http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/N3218.pdf], which says: Whereas our so-called Arabic numerals are ten in number (0–9), the Roman nu- merals number nine: I = 1 (one), V = 5, X = 10, L = 50, C = 100, Đ = 500 (D reg- ularly with middle bar, the modern form being simply D), a symbol for 1,000 (see below), Q = 500,000, and a rather strange symbol for 6: ↅ. Now that Q = 500,000 bit seems a little odd to me. I've never seen that anywhere else. Does anyone know where it came from? Is there real usage of Q for 500,000? Roman numerals have always been more complex than the standard (modern) way we've been taught to, and their use spans several millennia, over which may variation have occurred. If you look at wiipedia's table for middle age and Renaissance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numeral#Middle_Ages.2FRenaissance , you'll see that many letters of the alphabet have been used as Roman numerals. In this table, Q is supposed to stand for 500, but this is not necessarily in contradiction with 500,000, since there were several ways to go beyond 1000... As a side note on non-standard Roman numeral, I've seen 80,000 written IVXXM (like quatre vingt mille) in an old french edition of the Arthurial cycle. Frédéric
Q is a Roman numeral?
This isn't directly related to Unicode, but I thought this would be a good place to ask. Specifically, I'm curious about figure 14 (Gordon 1982) from WG2 N3218 [http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/N3218.pdf], which says: Whereas our so-called Arabic numerals are ten in number (0–9), the Roman nu- merals number nine: I = 1 (one), V = 5, X = 10, L = 50, C = 100, Đ = 500 (D reg- ularly with middle bar, the modern form being simply D), a symbol for 1,000 (see below), Q = 500,000, and a rather strange symbol for 6: ↅ. Now that Q = 500,000 bit seems a little odd to me. I've never seen that anywhere else. Does anyone know where it came from? Is there real usage of Q for 500,000? —Ben Scarborough
RE: Q is a Roman numeral?
I'm gonna take a wild stab here and assume that this is Q as the medieval Latin abbreviation for quingenti, which usually means 500, but also gets glossed just as a big number, as in milia quingenta thousands upon thousands. Maybe some medieval scribe substituted a Q for |V| (with an overscore on the V), which would be the more normal way to write 5,000 and then 500,000. --Ken Now that Q = 500,000 bit seems a little odd to me. I've never seen that anywhere else. Does anyone know where it came from? Is there real usage of Q for 500,000? —Ben Scarborough
