A Cool guide to Cistercian Numerals

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.

You missed the point. One’s own may never have to leave the page. But should one?

Don't be a 9933!

Aaand TTD (time to dick (time until the inevitable happens, someone eventually draws a dick)) is some 1,5 hours.

I bet they scribbled these mostly on the walls of their cells in their Monastery. You'd have to hang upside down from your bunk to misread it.

In all seriousness, wait until you hear that they wrote these horizontally when combined with Latin script.

6766?

Is this Tunic?

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)

9343? 😜

This would be interesting for when you have to number something and have very limited space and don't want the arabic numbers to be written too small.

I mean lets be honest, this technique is a couple hundred years old and was never adopted or even widespread. So ofc the method we use today is the superior one.

But this is very interesting and fun to play with. For everyone doing TTRPG or LARP this is a cool concept to integrate.

This is from the 13th century. So Arabic numbers were still very much growing in usage. So this would have been mainly as an alternative to Roman numerals.

To me this is better than a string of letters (the single symbol for 1993 for instance instead of MCMXCIII) but worse than Arabic numbering.

I was thinking about this one, and how it might be possible to get used to this system just as well. Neuroplasticity is so cool with how adaptable it makes us

It would be similar to writing each number out in quadrants, just with fewer lines for each digit.

7893 would become

9|3
7|8

1234 would become

3|4
1|2

It might function similar to how we read words and sentences in chunks instead of word-by-word or letter-by-letter. I imagine we already do that with some numbers, which is why we chunk numbers as 120,000.05 or 555-555-1234

Yeah. It's like saying you can write this whole sentence in a single QR code.

This system is absolutely more efficient, using one space for 4 digits of arabic numerals, and ease of use has more to do with familiarity than anything else. You only think the "common way" is easy because it's common to you. There are lots of number systems considered "the common way" to entire other cultures.

the "′0"s in the percentage symbol "%" aren't touching the "/". is it one or 3 symbols?

I should say as well - it's possible to do numbers higher than 9999 by writing the line horizontally and making it long, and I've heard it was done like that in rare cases but I will not provide sources.

But there's only 9 symbols, they just combine on top of each other instead of sequentially.

They kinda do. To read the numbers you look bottom left, bottom right, top left, top right. There will either be a line in each quadrant to indicate the digit or not. I don't particularly like the bottom to top convention, but I guess it make more sense to have the information at the top for the more every day life one and two digit numbers.