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What is the significance of the character "j" at the end of a Roman Numeral? (2013)
- bhjgjy 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nojs 2y agoLooks like vim when I forget to map jk to escape.
- petepete 2y agoOr when Romans sends smilies with Microsoft Outlook.
- kzrdude 2y agoNow I wonder why pharmacists used roman numerals
- kseistrup 2y agoThey're more difficult to fake. If the doctor prescribes 10 tablets, the user could be tempted to add a zero and thus get 100 tablets instead of 10. It's more difficult to turn an X into a C.
- af78 2y agoWell, one can turn X into XX or XXX... And handwritten prescriptions have become rare where I live, these days.
- _nalply 2y agoAnd as per the instruction of 1919 "it is customary to draw a line above all letters making up the number, the dots of i and j being put above the line" (in other words, the horizontal line is directly above v, x, c, and so on but between the dot of i and j and the lower part of the letter). I think this way it is difficult to add more Roman digits like x to fake a higher amount than prescribed. The letter j seems to be an additional security because i as a letter is narrow and one could perhaps squash in one or two more i's. The instruction also mentions that the number of dots is important, if the number of i and j is not the same as the number of dots above the line, the apothecary should assume an error.
- g15jv2dp 2y agoWhat prevented someone from just extending the line?
- _nalply 2y ago> I think this way it is difficult [...] It's just difficult, but not impossible. This said, such tampering is in my jurisdiction punishable by law (Art. 251 Forgery of a document), see https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/54/757_781_799/en#art_251 https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/54/757_781_799/en#art_251 I am sure in Common Law jurisdiction forgery of documents is also punishable. So such things are defended by a two-pronged approach: Make it difficult and forbid it.
- kazinator 2y agoSomeone forging a number is already going to the trouble to find seclusion so that they are unobserved, and to try to match the writing instrument (color, stroke and texture) and the handwriting of the existing digits. A horizontal square bracket would have been a more effective deterrent than just a line.
- _nalply 2y ago
- vidarh 2y agoBut you can add a C just as easily as adding a zero, and now you've turned 10 into 110 or 90 depending on whether there was space before or after the X. I guess adding a D or M would be a bit more suspicious.
- kseistrup 2y agoI never claimed it was impossible, just more difficult. Prevention of misreading is more important thar prevention of forgeries, I assume, and any misread og forged number would also have to match existing packaging sizes.
- vidarh 2y agoAdding a c is hardly more difficult than adding a 0. Matching packaging sizes is not necessary - I have had prescriptions that do not match packaging sizes many times - they will cut up sheets or transfer to other containers as needed.
- Anarch157a 2y agoThat's not universal. In my country, prescription medicine can only be sold in sealed boxes. Fractioning or tranfering to a different container is expressly forbidwn by law, so doctors always prescribe a number of boxes, not of pills. This makes a little more difficult to forge prescriptions.
- 8372049 2y agoThis applies to the entire EU/EEA, too.
- vidarh 2y agoThat must be recent, as it certainly was not the norm in the UK even prior to Brexit. For some medicines, UK pharmacists are required to split packs as needed to give exactly the number of pills prescribed. I can't find anything to suggest EU rules prevents split packs - I do see there was a tightening of the rules on how to treat packs if dispensing split backs a few years ago, but nothing since. Do you have a source? EDIT: At least as late as per the False Medicines Directive going into force in 2019, split pack dispensing was explicitly allowed - the FMD set out rules for the controls required to do so. E.g. the original container can not leave the dispensary until its entire content is used, and the pharmacy can't re-sell or supply other pharmacies with it.
- yreg 2y agoDid one need a prescription to buy medicine in 1919? It seems that prescription drugs were established in 1938 in US and in 1946 in UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durham%E2%80%93Humphrey_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durham%E2%80%93Humphrey_Amendm...
- kazinator 2y agoIt's easy to turn X into XX (20) or XL (40) or XC (90).
- OJFord 2y agoWell they were being given prescriptions (still are) for the location & frequency in Latin, in a way why use Arabic numerals?
- raverbashing 2y ago> A j was used for the final i, to make it clear the number had ended. Yeah I imagined this was the case. Same as other common ways to avoid misunderstanding (and possible forgeries)
- create-account 2y agoSeems Just like the letter -y at the end of a or Spanish (or English?) word is a glorified i, to make it more legible Ley, rey, etc.
- vasco 2y agoGreat, now I can't move.
- harperlee 2y agoThose come from latin lex, rex, so possibly more related to sloppy handwriting getting standardized? Edit: on the other hand, x used to be read /j/ (e.g. Quixote, Mexico), so also possibly lex —> lej —> ley
- bradrn 2y ago> Those come from latin lex, rex No, in fact they descend from the accusative forms, lēgem and rēgem. I don’t know much about the precise evolution, but g → y strikes me as a perfectly normal sound change, especially before /e/. Looks like it happened in the other Romance languages too: compare French roi, Portuguese rei, Italian re, etc.
- satiric 2y agoAnd in English as well. German "tag" (as in "guten tag"), to Old English "daeg" (with the g pronounced as a y), to Middle English "day".
- vidarh 2y agoIn that case, German switched to "t", not English from. High German is the main odd one out of the Germanic languages in this case. Compare "Dag" (low German)"; Saterland Frisian "Dai"; West Frisian "dei"; "dag" in Old Saxon, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish); Faroese and Icelandic "dagur"; Gothic "dags" d -> t is one of the major High German consonant shifts. Other examples of the d -> t shift is Vater vs. vader, fader, father (from Middle English "fader", so there the "th" in modern English is also not from the German) Others prominent changes around the same time included e.g. p -> ff (Schiff vs. ship, schip, ship, skip, skib in other Germanic languages) and /t/ -> /t:s/ etc. - compare Zwei with two, to, två in other Germanic languages. Very few of those changes made it into English, either Old English at the time, or later - English in that respect tends to be closer to Low German than to current standard German. (as an English speaker - or a speaker of basically any other Germanic language -, to learn German having a rough idea about the consonant shift is a major help in figuring out German vocabulary - you'll find a lot more German words are "close enough" to be understandable once you recognise the changed sounds)
- threatripper 2y agoNow i wonder if there's a connection between j and ; as termination character.
- quectophoton 2y agoThat's a good point, somehow I've never noticed the similarity between ";" and "j" until you pointed it out.
- yawboakye 2y agoin programming? otherwise the semi-colon has a history that doesn’t seem to be influenced by final characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicolon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicolon
- qznc 2y ago> if all the letters i and J are not dotted, the pharmacist may be in doubt as to the number intended. Oh, is that where "dot the i's and cross the t's" comes from? I can imagine that saying being hammered into many medical practitioners back then.
- amenhotep 2y agoPretty sure that's just a derivation from everyday handwriting. The i-dots and t-crosses are two typical elements that can't be written without lifting the pen, so it's quite a frequent thing to put pen to paper, write out a word that includes i and t but leave them unfinished so you can continue the rest of the letters in one fluid motion, then go back and finish them off by dotting and crossing them. Hence dotting is and crossing ts is going back to do final touches that you've neglected or may have missed while working quickly or casually.
- ahazred8ta 2y agoWe also have jot and tittle, from yod(י) and titulus(ʹ). Likewise 'not one iota'.
- gpvos 2y agoThe Dutch digraph ij originated from the same custom. Originally written ii, later ij, and pronounced as a long i (English "ee"), the sound later shifted to be similar to English "eye", see the Dutch names for the cities Berlijn and Parijs. Meanwhile, the long i sound is now written as ie. IJ is the only Dutch digraph that tends to be treated as a single letter and is capitalized as such. In education in the Netherlands it is taught as the 25th letter instead of y, which does not occur in native Dutch words, and in the phone book it used to be sorted together (mixed) with y. But since the advent of computers it is generally sorted as i followed by j. There are a few place names like Ysselsteyn where Y is pronounced as IJ.
- jetrink 2y agoVery interesting. An example that users of this forum will be familiar with is Edsger Dijkstra.
- segfaltnh 2y agoDoes this mean the correct pronunciation is "deekstra"?
- wirrbel 2y agono, daykstra. In the dutch of the middle-ages it might have been deekstra
- dep_b 2y agoIt’s more like dye-kstra. But that would still be wrong. It’s a sound that doesn’t exist in English. Daikstra - you can pronounce this Dijkstra - a sound in between you cannot pronounce coming from English Diekstra - you can pronounce this too
- samatman 2y agoIn IPA, the name is /dɛikstra/. Americans (English vowels vary quite extremely by dialect/accent, so I'm sticking with Standard American English) can easily pronounce ɛ, we say the word 'bed' as /bɛd/. But the 'ɛi' is a dipthong, and we don't have that dipthong. We have aɪ, as in 'bride' /bɹaɪd/, which is what usually comes out, at least for those of us who know that /dʒɪkstɹə/ is not even close to right. What you'll hear is generally something like /daɪkstɹə/, which make sense, as we pronounce 'dike' /daɪk/ as well. So yes, completely correct, I just wanted to add the IPA for clarity.
- Sharlin 2y agoSimilar flourish to the "long s" once used in English to spell the "ss" gemination: poſseſs or poſſeſs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
- nine_k 2y agoIn German, the ligature of ſ and s turned into a single character ß.
- gumby 2y agoIt was actually ſ+z, which is easier to see if you look at it in Fraktur, and is literally the name of the character. I have long been puzzled by how its romanization became „ss“. In older writing ‘s’ was just the terminal form of ‘ſ’ — if you needed two you just wrote ſſ, same as in English into the early 19th century. Other ligatures like tz and ch did not survive the jump into Roman letterforms, only ß for some reason. By the way the now obsolete dual letterforms of s (ſ/s) was inherited from Greek. We’re lucky it was still in use in Leibniz’s time or calculus notation would be more confusing!
- peterfirefly 2y agoThere were ligatures for both ss and sz. The name for the sz survived for both. The modern eszett glyph usually looks like an ss ligature (long s + short s).
- gumby 2y ago> The modern eszett glyph usually looks like an ss ligature (long s + short s). It is literally a ligature of the long s and z. This is unsurprisingly obvious in Fraktur, given the name, but you can see it in the Roman form ß: the upper concavity of ‚s‘ opens to the right while the upper concavity of ‚z‘ opens to the left (the bottom of Fraktur Z in both cases had/has a tail like g which is how you get the bottom part of the shape). I still have a few books printed in Fraktur — each time I pick one up (which is not frequently!) it’s is very hard to read at first, but after a few pages goes back to being easy. Since this phenomenon takes a little “priming” it’s annoying to encounter a sentence or phrase of Fraktur on a shop sign or other short, random location. Another commenter linked to an explanation of why a vowel shift caused “sz” to reflect “ss”. The character form and name are fossils (something I wish German retained more of — it’s one of the things I love about English).
- kqr 2y agoHere I was hoping it was indicating a complex number, since i was already taken. ...on that note, how would one write complex numbers in Roman numerals, now that both i and j are taken?
- neutronicus 2y agoNot a notational consideration that occurred to the Romans
- layer8 2y ago__ √–I
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- politelemon 2y agoReally interesting thanks for sharing. It's great to learn these little things which would have been well known at one point but start to be forgotten as time and society progresses.
- dtgriscom 2y agoFirst thought, without reading article: decimal point! (How else can you write pi in Roman numerals?)
- mannykannot 2y agoSo you should interpret xvij as 17, not 16. It's part of the number, not something appended. The original off-by-one error?
- gumby 2y agoA fun thought, but really Iust a reading error from someone ho didn’t know that i and j used to be variant forms of the same letter.
- asveikau 2y agoNo, it's because the letter J came about in the 4th century AD to cover the consonant version of I in Latin. J and I are thus equivalent. There is a similar history between U and V. The original latin alphabet just had V. U covers the case where V is a vowel. That is why in old carvings and statues they sometimes write U as V.
- tiffanyh 2y ago> J and I are thus equivalent. Why isn’t “june” then “iune”? > U covers the case where V is a vowel Why is “quit” not “qvit”? Because isn’t a “u” following a “q” always a non-vowel (constant)? https://www.ck12.org/spelling/u-a-vowel-that-can-act-as-a-consonant/lesson/u-As-a-Vowel-or-Consonant/#:~:text=While%20the%20letter%20is,as%20in%20quit%20or%20mosquito https://www.ck12.org/spelling/u-a-vowel-that-can-act-as-a-co....
- bitwize 2y ago> Why isn’t “june” then “iune”? In Latin, June would indeed have been IVNIVS.
- asveikau 2y agoI'm talking about historical use of these letters in Latin. But if you've seen middle and early modern English text that hasn't been sanitized for modern readers, you will see a lot of stuff. You'll see W written as uu. You'll see lots of Vs and Us trading places, in places we no longer put them. And eg. I kind of suspect the UK pronunciation of lieutenant, where u is /f/, has roots in it being /v/.
- lupire 2y agoHebrew has similar word-ending swashes: Final Kaf, Final Mem, Final Nun, Final Fe, Final Tzadi
- hanche 2y agoAnd Greek: Final sigma (σ) is written ς.
- jensenbox 2y agoThis feels like some kind of weird parity but or checksum-ish thing.
- gregatragenet3 2y agoThe most interesting thing is that that post sat for months without the answer "why" it was done, but chatgpt knew, from the comment added 2h ago. The j was to prevent forgery, or altering the document. ii could be altered later to iii.. but if it was ij its obvious its been tampered with if it later appears as iji
- layer8 2y agoStackExchange doesn't allow AI answers. ;)
- crtasm 2y agoThe question was asked over 10 years ago and now it's getting clicks from HN someone's copypasted a claim from a LLM, possibly without verifying it. That is kind of interesting, but not in a good way.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 2y agox can be altered to xx; why isn't that a problem?
- burkaman 2y agoChatGPT just read that on Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Use_in_the_Middle_Ages_and_Renaissance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Use_in_the_Mi..., https://samplecontents.library.ph/wikipedia/wp/r/Roman_numerals.htm https://samplecontents.library.ph/wikipedia/wp/r/Roman_numer...). Notably, Wikipedia's source (https://archive.org/details/materiamedica00bastgoog/page/584/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/materiamedica00bastgoog/page/584...) doesn't appear to say anything about fraud or forgery or tampering, and that explanation doesn't actually make much sense as it would be quite easy to circumvent. So please don't trust comments that just say "ChatGPT told me..."
- rossdavidh 2y agoThe question was "asked Oct 10, 2013 at 1:54" and the answer (which explains why it was done) was "answered Oct 10, 2013 at 2:58". A more likely take on chatgpt's answer is that their anti-fraud explanation is not even correct; the 2013 answer provides citations from the time explaining why, and anti-fraud is not mentioned.
- crazygringo 2y agoAs far as preventing forgery/tampering with the number, it's funny because this applies to merely the smallest part. The "j" instead of "i" prevents you from adding another 1 or 2 to the number, at most. Meanwhile, you could still change "ii" to "vii" or "xii" or "lxii" or whatever on the left side. And still often append "i" on the right side when it doesn't end in "j" -- "x" can still become "xj", "xij", "xvij", etc. It's just funny that you'd bother at all with "j" when it achieves so little. I see that it was also a practice to draw a line over the number -- why not just draw a whole box around it?
- mvkel 2y agoIsn't that true for all numerals? You can make 2 12, or 21. This is why in legal documents you'll see things like "no more than twelve (12) months"
- kazinator 2y agoOn cheques, you write the dollar part of the amount in words, with no margin to add anything on the left, and then immediately followed by a long horizontal dash to strike out anything that may be appended.
- earthboundkid 2y agoIn Japanese and Chinese, there are alternate numerals used on bank notes that have more strokes and therefore can't be amended. The normal number 1 is 一 and the fancy bank version is 壹.
- jmount 2y ago"dot the i's and cross the t's" (related to the 1919 referenced answer https://genealogy.stackexchange.com/a/3751 https://genealogy.stackexchange.com/a/3751 ).
- quotemstr 2y agoThey say that you should never fix a curfty system by rewriting it. The transition from Roman numerals to Arabic numbers is a great example of a situation in which you should ignore this advice.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 2y agoI don't understand why it's clear that xx is terminated, but not clear that iii is terminated, requiring the last i to be a j. (Furthermore, if you have additional syntax on it like a superscript th, why is the j still needed then. That's a pure onion in the varnish at that point; someone just using the j without thinking about its purpose and necessity.)
- dhosek 2y agoIt’s easier to squeeze in another i than another x in modifying a written note. Sort of like why amounts are written out in words as well as numbers on checks (young readers, ask your parents what checks are).
- DuncanCoffee 2y agoCould it be because of the shape of I? A scratch could easily make that shape, while an X requires at least two of them
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jll29 2y agoi and j are both post-Roman time glyphs for the Roman numeral I (=1).
- throw156754228 2y agoTLDR last I written as a J.
- caturopath 2y agoAnswer is confused. Everyone knows that Roman numeral imaginary numbers need to use `j` instead of `i` since `i` was already taken.
- codeyogini 2y ago[dead]
- kkjkj 2y ago[dead]
- trustno2 2y agoIt's just a smiley face in Wingdings font.