How were numbers, such as 45, spoken in Italy, Germany, and Spain in
1200 AD?
I am curious, because of my fury that in the Middle Ages, Christian
Europe adopted an Indian/Arabic base 10 numerical system rather than
the better base 12 system. Base 12 fits the number of Christian
Apostles. It fits the number of eggs in dozen. In base 12, you can
count on one hand.
http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/base-12.html
Were spoken numbers already in base 10? Was this a reason to adopt
base 10 instead?
In the 20th century, the French expressed numbers both with base 10
and with base 20: thus, 80 is quatre-vingts and 90 is
quatre-vingts-dix.
In the European Middle ages, did people -- in particular, merchants
who kept accounts -- already have a sense of what is meant by 45 in
base 10 but not for the equivalent 39 in base 12?
(The advantage of Roman numerals is that they permitted easy addition
and subtraction; Indian/Arabic numerals permitted relatively easy
multiplication and division at the cost of harder addition and
subtraction.)
According to Bodmer, in the 20th century, Italian has quaranta for
forty and cinque for five. I do not know the combination, but if it
is like English, it is quaranta-cinque. That is base 10, as you would
expect from the symbols.
How was the number expressed in 1200 AD?
--
Robert J. Chassell
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