Message text written by Patrick Powers > ...out of 446 dials which show 4am or 4pm and where I have now > entered this sort of detail, 273 use IIII and 173 use IV.
This is wonderfully quantitative information and my guess is that the ratio would not be much different for clock faces. > ... usage actually varies with type of dial... Other things being equal, I would naively expect on vertical dials to find IIII (for 4pm) used more on an east decliner where the pm time lines are more widely spaced and IV used more on a west decliner where they are closer together. Of course, other things are often not equal because one can deliberately choose to place the noon line off-centre and so so on but it would be interesting to know whether your data support the naive hypothesis! Frank King Cambridge University England -
