3 ms·
What are some examples?
by 13of40 3y ago
What are some examples?
- hulahoof 3y agoV -> VI -> VII I imagine that the ones with preceeding values would be harder though, perhaps XIX -> XX for example
- CoastalCoder 3y agoIn handwritten Arabic numerals, you could maybe get away with: 3 -> 8 (non-German) 7 -> 9 (German) 1 -> 4 5 -> 6
- LeonB 3y agoIf 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 3y agoThis is why you draw a line before, and after amounts on cheques.
- u801e 3y agoPresumably changing I to V or removing prefix subtraction characters (e.g., XIX becomes XX).
- wongarsu 3y agoThere'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 3y agoMore 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).