Sunday, February 05, 2012

Superbowl Roman Numerals

I will admit I'm not a big football fan, but it was a good game. We hosted a small family party.

My father and I got to talking about how the Romans *pronounced* their numerals. I mean, when they looked at something like XLVI, how did they say it?

XLVI is 46. It turns out that they had words for 40 and 6 , namely "quadraginta" and "sex", and from this page it looks like they said 46 simply as "quadraginta sex".

But if you read on you will see that when it came to 48, they said,"duodequinquaginta", which is literally "two from fifty".

Pity the Romans, who had to make do
with a pair of i's as a symbol for two.

If I were a Roman, I would feel glum
whenever I had to add up a sum.

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