4 ms·

Just remembered that Roman numerals were and still are common in legal documents and I have a vague memory that they were the standard for dates in legal docume

• gumby 4y ago
  I wonder if it made it harder to change dates back when contracts were written by hand. Similar to the now obsolete but preserved practice of writing a number in a contract both in digits and in words. Nowadays the only contract people write by hand is a check, and it preserves the “write the number twice” practice.
  • ofalkaed 4y ago
    I think it is the reason given by the second response in OP link which I find dubious in the sense of film aging but makes sense for written documents.
  • naniwaduni 4y ago
    Roman numerals are pretty easy to change, even compared to Arabic.
    • 13of40 4y ago
      What are some examples?
      • hulahoof 4y ago
        V -> VI -> VII I imagine that the ones with preceeding values would be harder though, perhaps XIX -> XX for example
        • CoastalCoder 4y ago
          In handwritten Arabic numerals, you could maybe get away with: 3 -> 8 (non-German) 7 -> 9 (German) 1 -> 4 5 -> 6
      • LeonB 4y ago
        If something ends with “I“ you can add two more I’s and have it go from 1 to 3. And so on. Using that appending technique works to sneak the year forward in most cases - perhaps that was the intended benefit? We can update the copyright from (say) 1950 to 1951 without any obvious tampering.
        • b112 4y ago
          This is why you draw a line before, and after amounts on cheques.
      • u801e 4y ago
        Presumably changing I to V or removing prefix subtraction characters (e.g., XIX becomes XX).
      • wongarsu 4y ago
        There's a German idiom "turning an X into a U" (U being a V) with the origin about changing the number on a chalkboard recording your purchases in a pub. In a hand-written contract you can do the opposite, adding two lines to turn a V into an X.
        • hnbad 4y ago
          More generally, a fun fact many miss about Roman numerals is that you can do this with all digits (except I because that would require fractions): X (10) -> V (5) C (100) -> L (50) M (1000) -> D (500) It's less obvious in prose like this but it helps if you consider that these numbers would normally be drawn with straight lines (e.g. M would often end up looking more like |X| instead of |V|, which explains why cutting it in half would result in |> or D). This is also a handy way of remembering the less frequently used digits like L or D which are harder to remember because they don't really stand for anything (unlike C = centum and M = mille).
    • VLM 4y ago
      Like many security policies, it merely has to be harder, not impossible. There is an interesting decoding aspect where a "M" can never follow a "V" in a roman numeral representation. So its technically very easy to turn a written capital V into a written capital M but its not actually useful in practice. Also there are word/letter spacing issues where technically one could remove "III" from the end of a numeral but it would probably result in typographically or graphic arts weird looking spacing.
    • grose 4y ago
      It’s interesting that Japan and China have separate more complex sets of numbers specifically to prevent this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals#Formal_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals#Formal_numbe...
      • seanc 4y ago
        TIL! Thanks. Fun fact, I just looked at my Aikido 2nd Dan certificate, and it uses a mix of formal and in-formal numerals. Informal for the certificate number and the date, and the formal character for '2' for my rank number.
  • rightbyte 4y ago
    > Similar to the now obsolete but preserved practice of writing a number in a contract both in digits and in words. I have always seen that as some check sum? I.e. both need to be wrong and the same wrong to mess things up.
    • tirpen 4y ago
      Yes, it's mostly to prevent someone from doodling and changing a 3 to an 8 somewhere in the amount.