On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV

Re:On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV by dhosek on Friday March 15, 2024 @10:23PM (#39722770)

There is a similar thing with Hebrew numerals¹ where 15 and 16 are usually written as תו and תז to avoid what would otherwise be forms of the name of God.

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1. The Hebrew numeral system, like the Greek numeral system is an almost-decimal system in that different letters are used for each of the different values, but the letters change by place value as well as by their individual value, so, e.g., 21 is written כא where כ stands for 20 and א stands for 1.

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Re:On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV by jddj on Friday March 15, 2024 @11:48PM (#39723223)

Japanese changed a couple too. From memory the pronunciation/written form of 4(?) was changed in some cases because it resembled death

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Re:On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV by xandrius on Saturday March 16, 2024 @03:20AM (#39723947)

In Japanese its often the case that a kanji has different ways of reading it, so it's not just that.

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Re:On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV by dhosek on Saturday March 16, 2024 @06:37PM (#39730099)

The only Japanese number form change I’m aware of is a special form for one (一) (and possibly two 二) to prevent them from being altered on checks into three (三), but I’m far from an expert.

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Re:On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV by madcaptenor on Friday March 15, 2024 @10:40PM (#39722869)

To clarify, those are 9 + 6 and 9 + 7; the forms to be avoided would be 10 + 5 and 10 + 6.

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Re:On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV by mariotacke on Friday March 15, 2024 @10:44PM (#39722888)

Interesting. I wonder if this is related to how Germans count/pronounce numbers. 21 in your example is "einundzwanzig" in German (or "ein-und-zwanzig", "one-and-twenty")

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Re:On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV by zeven7 on Friday March 15, 2024 @10:48PM (#39722909)

I think in this case it’s because Hebrew is read right to left, so unrelated.

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Re:On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV by dhosek on Saturday March 16, 2024 @06:34PM (#39730089)

Yep. The reversed order is also something that you see in archaic English, for example the nursery rhyme, “four and twenty blackbirds”

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Re:On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV by Adverblessly on Saturday March 16, 2024 @05:11PM (#39729493)

Minor correction: that's טו and טז.

אבגדהוזחט - count one through nine

יכלמנסעפצ - count ten through ninety

קרשת - count one hundred through four hundred

so תו would be 406 while טו is 9+6=15

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Re:On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV by dhosek on Saturday March 16, 2024 @06:39PM (#39730113)

D’oh that’s what I get for trusting my mediocre Hebrew keyboarding skills. For those who don’t know the Hebrew alphabet, both ת and ט are commonly transcribed as T (the former often as TH, but it’s meant to be a German aspirated T sound rather than the English th).

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