Latin numbers in different languages symbols
Writing, however, only developed in a few places in the world. There are literally thousands of languages in the world right now, and thousands more that have gone extinct.
![latin numbers in different languages symbols latin numbers in different languages symbols](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/74/fb/6e/74fb6e6649515339a4220850f810a00c--magic-symbols-symbols-and-meanings.jpg)
The comparison of language to writing also isn't a very good one. Their usage really has more to do with the influence of Western culture in the area.
![latin numbers in different languages symbols latin numbers in different languages symbols](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ef/24/6c/ef246c6f2fbb00dcb0e2fb296fd538bf.png)
Western numerals can be seen as more modern, trendy, or, in the case of systems based on Chinese characters, simpler and easier to read from a distance. The presence of western numbers in foreign writing has a lot to do with the spread of western culture it's the same reason people all over the world watch Hollywood films. And people in East Asia still sometimes use their own old symbols: they've been adapted to follow similar rules, again, because it's so clearly better than a system that uses different symbols for every possible number.)Įven the Indian and Arabic the western system is derived from look quite different. They keep doing that because it's an equally good system, and because of history. (As it happens, not everyone uses exactly the same symbols even in modern societies: in the Middle East they use a set of symbols that are much closer to the original form of the Arabic numerals. You ever tried to learn a new language? Hard, huh? But memorising ten symbols - that's easy. (3) Why does everyone use the same set of ten symbols?īecause a set of ten symbols gets adapted in alien cultures far more easily than a whole new language ever could. Arabic/Indian numerals were a gigantic step forward in making mathematics accessible to everyone. The ancient Greeks used different symbols depending on which column you were in, which was dumb. The ancient Babylonians used a hybrid base-10/base-60 system with digits for the 60s and one, two, three, etc. (2) Why does everyone use a set of 10 symbols with the same organisation of 1s column, 10s column, 100s column, etc.?īecause it is so enormously better than any other system that has ever been tried. There are minor reasons why base 10 systems are common in history - namely, the fact that most of us have ten fingers - but there's no real advantage in it. Base 10 systems have been common in the past, so they continue to be now. The answer to this is basically: the chances of history. There are really three questions, though: Pretty much all modern societies use the base 10 system and the symbols you describe (though there are variants in Middle Eastern countries), so the question is a valid one. It was a lot easier and shorter to use numerals to represent numbers in a lot of written languages than the written symbols (165 instead of writing 'one hundred sixty-five', for example), so their use became widely adopted. Just England alone, for an example, had colonies literally all over the globe - in Asia, in the Americas, in Africa. Later, during periods of colonialism, the Arabic numerals got spread thoughout the world. They were passed from India to Persia, then spread throughout the Arabic world until they were picked up by Europeans. These numerals are called 'Arabic' or 'Arabic-Indian' because of where they were originally used. Using the same, universal numerals - 1 2 3 etc - is a fairly recent change. There are some groups that didn't always use a base 10 counting system, too (can't think of an example off the top of my head for this one, though). For example, Chinese and Japanese used (and still use) kanji to write out numbers - think of it as the equivalent of spelling out the words we use in English for numbers 'one' instead of 1, for example. But once it was recorded so ↆ.They didn't always. There you can find their old form of writing. Roman numerals are in the section of the number form 2150–218F. At the same time the figure should not be repeated more than three times in a row. The smaller figure to the right of the larger one is added to it, and the one to the left is subtracted. The numbers are made up from Roman numerals in the following way. In the figure 90 nine means ninety, and in 951 – nine hundred. The Roman numeral X means ten and it also means ten in the number XII and in the number CX. In such systems the value of a figure does not depend on its position in the numeral. These elements represent a nonpositional numeral system. Perhaps they borrowed some of the signs from the protocelts. This tribe lived in the North-West of the Apennine Peninsula. They appeared in the sixth century BC in the Etruscans. Roman numerals – numbers used by the ancient Romans.