Le 08/01/2013 01:26, Ben Scarborough a écrit :
This isn't directly related to Unicode, but I thought this would be a
good place to ask.
Specifically, I'm curious about figure 14 (Gordon 1982) from WG2 N3218
[http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/N3218.pdf], which says:
Whereas our so-called Arabic numerals
are ten in number (0–9), the Roman nu-
merals number nine: I = 1 (one), V = 5, X
= 10, L = 50, C = 100, Đ = 500 (D reg-
ularly with middle bar, the modern form
being simply D), a symbol for 1,000 (see
below), Q = 500,000, and a rather strange
symbol for 6: ↅ.
Now that Q = 500,000 bit seems a little odd to me. I've never seen
that anywhere else. Does anyone know where it came from? Is there real
usage of Q for 500,000?
Roman numerals have always been more complex than the standard (modern)
way we've been taught to, and their use spans several millennia, over
which may variation have occurred. If you look at wiipedia's table for
middle age and Renaissance,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numeral#Middle_Ages.2FRenaissance ,
you'll see that many letters of the alphabet have been used as Roman
numerals. In this table, Q is supposed to stand for 500, but this is not
necessarily in contradiction with 500,000, since there were several ways
to go beyond 1000...
As a side note on non-standard Roman numeral, I've seen 80,000 written
IVXXM (like quatre vingt mille) in an old french edition of the
Arthurial cycle.
Frédéric
