10 ms·
On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV
- hexo 3y agoI've never seen such four on clock face, it was always IV
- periram 3y agoInstead of having an exception to the rule, make the exception the rule -> It would have been great if IX was XIIII too.
- ijxjdffnkkpp 3y agoI know you must mean VIIII
- periram 3y agoVIIII indeed.
- WhyOhWhyQ 3y agoThis has always been one of my go-to fun facts.
- BugsJustFindMe 3y agoThe third image they show uses IV.
- al_borland 3y agoAs much as the IIII has bothered me over the years, actually seeing IV on a clock face makes me think IIII is the right choice. That said, I always go with Arabic numerals, so it's a moot point for me, practically speaking.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- timbit42 3y agoI've seen many clocks with either.
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoBut its not Doc Brown can’t be wrong: https://clickamericana.com/wp-content/uploads/Back-to-the-Future-III-Clock-tower-in-1885-1536x954.jpg https://clickamericana.com/wp-content/uploads/Back-to-the-Fu...
- somat 3y agoNicely symmetrical around the 5 and the 10. Which makes me want to produce this cursed set of roman numerals. IIIIV IIIV IIV IV V VI VII VIII VIIII
- hex4def6 3y agoThis seems like a much better fleshed out exploration of this subject: https://monochrome-watches.com/why-do-clocks-and-watches-use-roman-numeral-iiii-instead-of-iv/ https://monochrome-watches.com/why-do-clocks-and-watches-use...
- aidenn0 3y ago> ...the Roman numeral system changed to the more familiar subtractive notation. However, this was well after the fall of the Roman Empire. This contradicts examples that Wikipedia has of subtractive notation during the height of the Roman Empire (though it's not clear to me when "IV" became the accepted standard form).
- btmiller 3y agoI like the literacy explanation. If reading letters was hard enough for enough people, why add extra complexity by introducing a subtractive system? But as the populous becomes more educated and there’s less concern about reading ability, it makes sense that the next domino to fall is “boy those 4 i’s in a row sure are hard to distinguish”. Complexity gets progressively introduced — that to me sounds like lots of tech adoption curves.
- nvader 3y agoThe reason that I heard was that it was easy to mass-engrave a single plate: VIIIIX For each clock, you make 4 of these, and split each block into numbers the following way: V IIII I X VI III IX (mirror the IX for 11) VII II IX VIII IIX This lets you mass produce watch numbers with a minimum of wasted material.
- ghostly_s 3y agoI think most clocks and watches would have the numerals engraved directly into the face, and if they were separate pieces as on a tower clock they would be either be engraved by hand or with a pantograph, but probably not engraved at all but cut out from a sheet. In any case I don't see how your method creates any meaningful economies of scale — if anything four 'I's requires _more_ material than an 'IV.'
- qprofyeh 3y agoBrilliant if true!
- JoBrad 3y agoDoesn’t that also work for IVIIIX?
- madcaptenor 3y agoThat’s six letters. The full set I through XII uses 26 letters (if you use IV) or 28 (if IIII), so there will be some wastage.
- pfannkuchen 3y agoNit: Does the plate need a fifth I? Also 12 needs to be mirrored I think. Otherwise lgtm.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 3y agoI wonder how much Roman numerals are even taught any longer. Maybe 5 years ago now I was traveling with a friend who went to a solid US suburban high school outside of a major city. Younger than me but certainly not young. And she asked me what a date written in Roman numerals was in the numbering system we normally use. I was somewhat floored. Thinking about it though. It sort of is cultural/historical trivia. How many hours do you spend in school drilling how Roman numerals are constructed rather than teaching something else. I suppose it's nice enough for those who encounter them when traveling. But pretty far on the not-essential end of the axis.
- rsynnott 3y agoHrm, _are_ they actually taught rigorously somewhere? I mean, I assume you’d be exposed to them if you studied Latin, and I vaguely remember them being used as an example of a non-positional number system in maths, but other than that my only real exposure to them was the BBC (BBC TV shows used to show the date they were produced in Roman numerals, for reasons I was never particularly clear on.)
- djur 3y agoI was taught about Roman numerals in school (mid-90s) but it was a brief thing, maybe a few homework assignments in a larger unit about Roman history. Certainly not hours of drilling. I can read a clock fine, and I can read a date if I spend some time thinking it through. But it's not really a life skill.
- ghaff 3y agoNot remembering the details, but learning it in the 70s or so, I can look at a Roman date and not immediately grasp the year in terms I'm more familiar with but I can decode it in 10 seconds or so. I assume there was a fair bit of drilling if I remember after all this time. But then I had a couple years of Latin too.
- reaperman 3y agoI'd say it's good to be exposed to for a short few lessons at a young age. My friends and I found endless fascination with them and enjoyed inventing our own numbering systems. It helped a lot when I had to think in other bases like binary or hexadecimal, because my perspective had been broadened by roman numerals. But I'd say maybe not waste too much time on it. Kids will play with whatever they play with, you can lead them to water but cannot make them drink. We just happened to enjoy playing with number systems, and it helped a lot that our school introduced us to several for us to play with initially.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoI collect roman coins, and they also used IIII themselves on at least a couple of types I can think of, and also VIIII instead of IX.
- hnbad 3y agoThis shouldn't be surprising given that even orthography and names were often not standardized consistently for most of history. For example, Adolf Hitler's grandfather was called Hiedler, not Hitler and the spelling change was the result of his father's name, Alois Hitler, being changed later in his life after first being recorded as Aloys Schicklgruber (the family name being that of his mother rather than father as the fatherhood was apparently initially contested). Or for orthography you just need to look at any historical text pre-19th century or so and you'll find plenty of oddities that often change regionally or even between writers in the same region. Now expand this to the time scale and area of the Roman Empire/Republic and it's amazing most of it was somehow coherent over time. Actually as far as I recall, the "subtractive" style was only used consistently in the Middle Ages. Another odd variant I've seen is "IIX" instead of "VIII". And let's not talk about how larger numbers were represented or shenanigans like the "long I" instead of "II".
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoThat was a quick escalation to Hitler - just goes to prove Godwin's law! :) I didn't realize the subtractive style really dates to the middle ages, but that certainly seems consistent with the coins - I checked a bunch more and none seem to use it.
- hnbad 3y agoAs far as I know the subtractive style was in use in Rome but the purely additive one was more widely used until the Middle Ages. There are also examples where multiplicatives are used but the only thing I can find on Wikipedia is an example from the Middle Ages: "XIII. M. V. C. III. XX. XIII" (13573 = 13x1000 + 5x100 + 3x20 + 13) and a medieval one using superscript: XV ^C XIX (15x100 + 10 + 9) As for the Hitler one: he just happens to be a widely known person with a family name that changed not so long ago. Plus I actually first learned this from someone joking about whether he'd have been as successful if his father had never changed his name from Schicklgruber. Fun fact: "Hitler" was officially supposed to be pronounced with a long "i" (ee) like Hiedler but apparently Hitler didn't like this pronunciation and suppressed it once in power.
- aidenn0 3y agoIt's unclear to me when the (now standard) subtractive form became the standard; there are examples in Roman times of e.g. IIX for 8, and VIIII for 9, both of which would be non-standard today.
- ghaff 3y agoLike spelling, a lot of things used to be far less standardized.
- JdeBP 3y agoOr, rather, our idea of what the standard was, skewed as it is by survivorship bias and coming centuries after the fact, is superficial and wrong.
- hnlmorg 3y agoIt’s more the case that the world is big and communication used to be slow. So regional variations would develop. Sometimes becoming their own language, given enough time. It’s easy to forget how hard it is to standardise a large populous given everything these days can be shared at near-to-light-speed but even today you have regional slang. Terms that might be common in the north of a country but alien to southerners. So I find it entirely believable that there were multiple “standards” for Roman numerals that spanned different regions and periods of time.
- JdeBP 3y agoEven thinking of this as regional variations developing is superficial and wrong. There likely was not a single central standard to splinter in the first place. Framing this in terms of modern concepts like centralized government-backed standards that get communicated out is a mistake. The reality is far more likely that the notations IIII and IV were equivalent, to any numerate person of the era; and if asked about what the difference is their response would likely be the same as a modern person being asked about the two glyphs for "a" and "g" in many English alphabet typefaces (or even the various open and closed glyphs that Indian numeral "4" can have). They are so used to the forms that they don't even register a difference that is glaring to outsiders, let alone consider one to be "wrong" and the other "right".
- kibwen 3y ago> The numerical notation of 4 is IV in Roman numerals. Using "IIII" instead of "IV" isn't even necessarily wrong. Rome was a big empire with a widely-distributed populace that lasted for a thousand years. The usage of numerals changed over time and according to context: "While subtractive notation for 4, 40 and 400 (IV, XL and CD) has been the usual form since Roman times, additive notation to represent these numbers (IIII, XXXX and CCCC)[9] continued to be used, including in compound numbers like 24 (XXIIII),[10] 74 (LXXIIII),[11] and 490 (CCCCLXXXX).[12] The additive forms for 9, 90, and 900 (VIIII,[9] LXXXX,[13] and DCCCC[14]) have also been used, although less often. The two conventions could be mixed in the same document or inscription, even in the same numeral. For example, on the numbered gates to the Colosseum, IIII is systematically used instead of IV, but subtractive notation is used for XL; consequently, gate 44 is labelled XLIIII." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Origin As for clock faces, the explanation that I always heard was that it simplified the manufacturing process to use IIII rather than IV; something about making better use of materials to have one fewer V and one more I.
- tempestn 3y agoOne cool thing about the purely additive notation is that you can then add numbers together by just gathering up all their characters, sorting largest to smallest, and combining any groups of 5 or more.
- tempestn 3y agoOr in one step, by combining them from smallest to largest, combining and carrying as you go.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI can’t see any logic in the manufacturing theory. V is already on the clock many times so they’re making them, and IIII is more material and parts.
- withinboredom 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dbheree 3y ago[flagged]
- ghostly_s 3y agoThis sounds like conspiracy theory to me.
- labster 3y agoIt’s not a conspiracy, it’s just that we lost a lot of knowledge when the Mud Flood destroyed the Tartarian Empire. That’s why we don’t know how to build giant mechanical public clocks any more, and everything is digital clocks now.
- userbinator 3y agoActually sounds more like LLM output to me. (The first sentence, in particular, and some stylistic choices in the following ones.)
- gjsman-1000 3y agoI would like a citation on that. The only people reading books with abbreviations at the time would have academics, simply because we didn’t have the printing press yet and books were scarce. Scarce enough that there would be almost nowhere needing an abbreviation in the first place.
- ghostly_s 3y agoIMHO there's an obvious reason not mentioned: due to their position on the dial and convention IV and VI would typically be depicted upside down, increasing the likelihood of confusing them—particularly with a semi-literate populace.
- jhanoncomm 3y agoThe way I read a watch ignores the numbers anyway (arabic or roman) and I know where 9 is etc. if the device is upside down it is evident and I don’t even try to read it, I right the clock or take off and restrap the watch.
- uzyn 3y agoI have always believed this to be the reason.
- jeffxtreme 3y agoThis is mentioned in the article, but it's a small piece in a paragraph so understand why it could be missed: "Somebody thought IV was not easily understandable because it resembled VI..." (in paragraph 2)
- ekianjo 3y agosemi literate populace did not have watches though...
- ummonk 3y agoClocktowers on the other hand...
- hakdbha 3y ago[dead]
- croes 3y agoSo why would IV and VI a problem and IX and XI not?
- technothrasher 3y agoI've always thought the "well balanced and looks better" was the simplest and most likely of the theories out there on why the IIII is used. Dials that use IV just look funny to me, but perhaps that's simply because they're rare.
- tylerneylon 3y agoI had heard that IV might be considered sacrilegious, as the god Jupiter would have once been spelled IVPPITER, as I was used for modern J and V for modern U.
- dhosek 3y agoThere 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. ⸻ 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.
- Adverblessly 3y agoMinor 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
- dhosek 3y agoD’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).
- madcaptenor 3y agoTo clarify, those are 9 + 6 and 9 + 7; the forms to be avoided would be 10 + 5 and 10 + 6.
- mariotacke 3y agoInteresting. 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")
- Vitaly_C 3y agoI vaguely recall this was an important fact to know for a 90s puzzle video game. Maybe it was The Seventh Guest? Or Myst?
- aftbit 3y agoI knew that both forms were common because I was lucky enough to have a Latin teacher who assigned as extra credit "write this number in Roman numerals" and also accepted additive notation for this reason. He even argued that IIIIIIIIII could be a valid if cheesy alternative to X based on very early texts, but this might have just been a bluff. I never tried to write 123 as IIIII...III.
- riffic 3y agoit can go either way
- narag 3y agoAs kibwen said, there wasn't a clear "standardized" form. Most rules were invented much later. "IC" was perfectly understood by Romans that would have used "MXMII" without a second thought. The reason of "IIII" is of usability for clocks that can be seen from different angles. Six can only be written as "VI" so "IV" is changed to "IIII" to prevent confusion. Of course there are all kind of urban legends and fake stories of kings requesting the number be written this or that way. In case someone doesn't know, a fun fact: "I" is one finger, "V" represent the open hand (think pinky and thumb in angle) and "X" both open hands united. So 1, 5, 10.
- gue5t 3y agoThis is one of the ways you can tell if an INTERCAL implementation is worth its salt.
- 8bitsrule 3y agoAccording to The Internet, this: https://web.archive.org/web/20201115002205/https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/public-clocks-do-a-number-on-roman-numerals/2011/11/04/gIQAenKllM_blog.html https://web.archive.org/web/20201115002205/https://www.washi...
- nescioquid 3y agoIn Latin, sometimes numbers have synonyms, like 18 (two from twenty or eight and ten). In my mind, the Roman system was very obvious. Then I learned to read a little French, and had genuine curiosity about the reasoning behind this soixante-dix-neuf character. edit: sometimes I wonder if arithmetic arose simply from naming numbers
- mckn1ght 3y agoYeah, the 90s in french always tripped me out. 91 = quatre-vingt-onze = four-twenty-eleven
- nescioquid 3y agoI never can decide, but I think you have made the correct point. For me, it was "four twenties, nine and ten", which was only funny because one said "sixty, nine and ten". I dunno, I love it and it terrifies me. The first time I went abroad, I was in a wine caveau and paying the teller. When she said the price, my mind went blank -- pitch black. She said "five" impatiently in every language I spoke -- even latin -- and I kept wondering, yes, but what and five?
- gerikson 3y agoTry learning to count in Danish.
- kettro 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigesimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigesimal
- rocqua 3y agoFrench used to have a sort of base 20 numbering system. And it is more like our current number system arose because it makes arithmetic so much simpler.
- usr1106 3y agoLike the British used to have shillings?
- staplung 3y agoFun fact: in Roman numerals there is no standard way to write numbers above 3999. There are basically two competing camps for how to write them. One with C's and backwards C's acting kinda like parens and one with lines over the letters. On the other hand, they had semi-standard numerals for all sorts of odd fractions like 1⁄288 = ℈.
- ummonk 3y agoIt's odd that they still use IX though, since that is indistinguishable from inverted XI (IV and VI, by contrast, are distinguishable even after rotation).
- 3ace 3y agoPrior of this, I thought the clock in my home has a misprint or a defect product because of it use IIII instead of IV
- mark-r 3y agoIt took me a minute to realize that I even had a clock in the house with Roman numerals! Yes, it uses IIII. You'd think it would be easier to remember given that I had to change it less than a week ago.
- mayd 3y agoIf Roman numerals are printed around the perimeter of the clock face with the base of each numeral on the same circle, as opposed to printing the numerals horizontally, then the numerals towards the bottom are harder to read because they are nearly upside down. This makes it harder to distinguish quickly between IV and VI. One solution is to use IIII instead of IV.
- jurip 3y agoSandi Toksvig made the point in a QI episode that if you use IIII, you get a pleasing symmetry with the number of Vs and Xs on a clock face. Four numbers with only Is, four numbers with a V and four numbers with a X. I'd be surprised if that was the reason, but it's kind of neat. I II III IIII V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII
- Amorymeltzer 3y agoThis is exactly where I first learned about this style; I looked it up and loved it.
- hardstyle 3y agoThis is the Watchmaker’s Four
- bhasi 3y agoThis is relatively well-known in watch circles as the "watchmaker's four".
- PlaneSploit 3y agoSurprised I had to go down this far to find this. Clockmaker's 4 / watchmaker's 4 is an aesthetic or balance thing more than a historical vestige. Source: own an Omega De Ville Hour Vision
- xxmarkuski 3y agoI still remember vividly how I once wrote IIII instead of IV in an outline numbering at school and my teacher was furious about it and basically told me I was stupid for writing it that way. So glad these days are over.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoI'm sorry this happened to you. Sadly, the days of stupid and abusive teachers are far from over. I think you're focusing on the wrong thing here. If it hadn't been Roman numerals it would have been something else. Teachers are much the same as cops. Some go into those fields because they genuinely want to help people. Other go into them because they enjoy having power.
- ce4 3y ago"The Mystery of Numerical Notation on the Dial Plate - 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV" Here is the uneditorialized headline. Especially it is called dial plate, not clock face.
- eps 3y ago> The Seiko Museum Ginza Has someone been to this place? Is it worth a visit?
- Max-q 3y agoWhen talking about wrong usage of Roman numbers, the first that comes to mind is a well known, and much copied, tattoo that writes 1975 not as MCMLXXV.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoI guess I have only seen other dials than the article describes, where the 4 is actually IV. Maybe what the article describes is a regional thing.
- usr1106 3y agoI learned Roman numbers in school when I was nine. For me being interested in math it was logical that 4 consecutive symbols are against the rules and it needs to be IV. When I was 14 my grandmother died we got an old clock and it showed IIII. I came to the conclusion it's a poor piece of craftsmanship, the clockmaker just did not know math. Otherwise clocks with Roman numbers were not common at all where I lived. The old clock is still in my living room over 40 years later (not in a prominent place, I don't find it impressive anymore like I did when I was younger). When reading this I notice that numbers on the lower half are upside down. Had not paid attention to this for over 40 years.
- djmips 3y agoAesthetics seems like the best answer.
- AtNightWeCode 3y agoMy guess is that IIII was used before IV in various cases. So maybe a mistake or to reduce confusion.
- timbit42 3y agoMy dad has fixed old pendulum and wind up clocks for years as a hobby. He also fixes old tube radios. There are half a dozen to a dozen clocks around his house at any time. Some have IIII and some have IV. I can't say I've seen one more than another.
- BeetleB 3y agoHeh. When I was a teenager, I once convinced my parents not to buy a clock because it used IIII instead of IV. Clearly a counterfeit! Then we went home and noticed all the clocks in the house had IIII.