[HN Gopher] What is the significance of the character "j" at the...
___________________________________________________________________
What is the significance of the character "j" at the end of a Roman
Numeral? (2013)
Author : kamaraju
Score : 392 points
Date : 2024-07-21 05:31 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (genealogy.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (genealogy.stackexchange.com)
| nojs wrote:
| Looks like vim when I forget to map jk to escape.
| petepete wrote:
| Or when Romans sends smilies with Microsoft Outlook.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Now I wonder why pharmacists used roman numerals
| kseistrup wrote:
| They'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 wrote:
| Well, one can turn X into XX or XXX... And handwritten
| prescriptions have become rare where I live, these days.
| _nalply wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| What prevented someone from just extending the line?
| _nalply wrote:
| > 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 h
| ttps://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/54/757_781_799/en#art_2
| 51
|
| 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 wrote:
| Someone 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 wrote:
| So find a time machine and travel back and tell the
| people of your superior solution.
|
| scnr
| kremi wrote:
| Checks are quite foolproof too - spelling out the number
| (a hundred eighty eight) and writing the number (188),
| like on checks.
|
| The paragraph you mention seems to worry more about
| mistakes more than tempering attempts though (taking 10x
| the dose prescribed could indeed be problematic)
| HPsquared wrote:
| The important part there is the termination characters.
| "Dollars" / "Pounds only" etc. and the decimal point
| (though that's easier to turn into a comma and make into
| thousands... Funnily enough the German way of using comma
| as the decimal separator avoids this)
| kijin wrote:
| Yeah, we've tried null-terminated strings and it wasn't
| fun. Better use a more explicit, highly visible
| character.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Polish still regularly does this for contracts and all
| kinds of legal document.
|
| I regularly see verbiage like "person A promises to pay
| person B 100 (in words, one hundred) zloty upon
| termination of this contract."
| vidarh wrote:
| But 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Adding 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 wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| This applies to the entire EU/EEA, too.
| vidarh wrote:
| That 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| If it's prescribed as number of boxes it changes nothing,
| as it's then just the number of boxes you need to alter
| instead of number of pills.
| inkyoto wrote:
| The cited text has an extra detail: <<...
| and it is customary to draw a line above all the letters
| making up the number, the dots of i and j being put above
| this line; for example, xviij>>
|
| So, XVIII would have been written likes this:
| _____ XVIII -----
|
| Lines would clearly delineate the beginning and the end of
| the number. This is how I have written the Roman numerals
| since school.
|
| So, if the script had X written that way, adding a C, would
| have also required both lines to be extended. Not
| impossible to forge, but an extra effort nevertheless.
| vidarh wrote:
| Extending a straight line sounds like the easiest part of
| the process compared to reproducing a letter so that it
| matches the handwriting. As an indicator of _error_ this
| seems to work fine, but to prevent fraud it seems
| marginal at best.
| 8372049 wrote:
| Getting a prescription for 90 pills instead of 100 would
| presumably raise suspicion.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| Probably depends, my prescriptions seem to be 90 days.
| vidarh wrote:
| Why? If I'm prescribed a course of something for 90 days,
| I will get 90 pills, even if the packs have 100.
|
| It might differ by location, but here (I'm in the UK),
| it's not unusual to e.g. get 14 pills of antibiotics if
| prescribed a two week course even if the package is in
| units of 10, for example.
| yreg wrote:
| Did 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_Amendm.
| ..
| kazinator wrote:
| It's easy to turn X into XX (20) or XL (40) or XC (90).
| OJFord wrote:
| Well they were being given prescriptions (still are) for the
| location & frequency in Latin, in a way why use Arabic
| numerals?
| raverbashing wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Seems 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 wrote:
| Great, now I can't move.
| harperlee wrote:
| Those 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 wrote:
| > Those come from latin lex, rex
|
| No, in fact they descend from the accusative forms, _legem_
| and _regem_. 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 wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| In 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, tva 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)
| yawboakye wrote:
| correction: spanish is heavily ablative case instead of
| accusative. original statement is correct in principle
| since lex, rex are nominative and first in a nominative-
| genetive form in latin dictionaries. eg. _lex, legis_.
| _rex, regis_.
| switch007 wrote:
| > spanish is heavily ablative case instead of accusative
|
| Is it? Aren't the descendants of the ablative mostly
| -amante adverbs and e.g. conmigo? The wiki article of
| Ablative Case doesn't even mention Spanish.
|
| Got any other examples of ablative in Spanish?
| asveikau wrote:
| X in Mexico or Quixote used to be pronounced as "sh". I think
| X is still used for that sound in Portuguese or Basque or
| Catalan if I'm not mistaken.
|
| In the case of Mexico they were transcribing a word from
| indigenous people.
|
| In a bunch of Spanish words coming from Latin, it was often
| from Latin double S. Eg. paxaro, from Vulgar Latin passarum.
| I can also think of cases of this sound coming from Arabic,
| eg. modern ojala was once oxala which is a cognate with
| "inshallah", note the sh sound.
|
| Sometime around the 1500s this sound changed to /x/ and they
| changed spellings of a few different sounds whose values had
| shifted over the centuries. X had merged with a sound they
| spelled with J, derived from Latin words with J in them.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| And the Dutch digraph/ligature "ij" is like "y" with an umlaut.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)
| JW_00000 wrote:
| > IJ probably developed out of ii, representing a long [i:]
| sound [...]. In the Middle Ages, the i was written without a
| dot in handwriting, and the combination ii was often confused
| with u. Therefore, the second i was elongated: ij. Later, the
| dots were added, albeit not in Afrikaans, a language that has
| its roots in Dutch. In this language y is used instead.
|
| > Alternatively, the letter J may have developed as a swash
| form of i. _In other European languages it was first used for
| the final i in Roman numerals when there was more than one i
| in a row, such as iij for "three", to prevent the fraudulent
| addition of an extra i to change the number._ In Dutch, which
| had a native ii, the "final i in a row elongated" rule was
| applied as well, leading to ij.
|
| > Another theory is that IJ might have arisen from the
| lowercase y being split into two strokes in handwriting. At
| some time in the 15th or 16th century, this combination began
| to be spelled as a ligature ij. An argument against this
| theory is that even in handwriting which does not join
| letters, ij is often written as a single sign.
|
| So indeed maybe the same as the Roman numerals. Interesting,
| I didn't know this. (Also interesting that no one really
| knows where this letter came from.)
| gumby wrote:
| It doesn't undergo the phonetic process of _umlaut_ , Don,
| and as it's a vowel the two dots are more like a simple
| diaeresis.
|
| It is used in that way in French too.
| gpvos wrote:
| It is neither umlaut nor diaeresis, but just an i and a j
| with each their own dot smushed together into a ligature,
| which can take either the form of a y with both those dots
| on top, or a more rounded form that more resembles an i and
| j joined together.
|
| I guess in other languages than Dutch it could be a y with
| a diaeresis or umlaut.
| asveikau wrote:
| I think Old Spanish had i in some of those. Like rei. Or i
| meaning and.
| create-account wrote:
| Old Spanish was probably closer to the real pronunciation and
| had also more variety, depending on the whim of the scribe.
| Most of the greatest works ever written in Spanish are prior
| to the standardisation by the RAE at the end of the 18th
| century, indeed
| asveikau wrote:
| I don't know. An /i/ near a vowel in Spanish tends to
| become /j/. I usually see the consonant y transcribed as
| [j].
|
| Wikipedia on Spanish phonology notes the difference in
| pronunciation between _viuda_ and _ayuda_ which is an
| interesting contrast in two very similar sounding words.
|
| Old Spanish had a lot of phonological differences so I'm
| not sure you can do a straight comparison.
| anthk wrote:
| Old Spanish it's something from 1200. Since Nebrija, the
| modern spelling was near already there.
| asveikau wrote:
| Old Spanish lasted until about 1500 afaik. The contrast
| wasn't just spelling, the spelling differences are due to
| deeper phonetic changes.
| anthk wrote:
| I know; but since Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes the
| modern phonetic changes were already there.
|
| I own an anotated Lazarillo book for modern Spanish
| readers, btw. It will describe you every ancient jargon
| and old sayings as footnotes. And, of course, some of the
| context.
| threatripper wrote:
| Now i wonder if there's a connection between j and ; as
| termination character.
| quectophoton wrote:
| That's a good point, somehow I've never noticed the similarity
| between ";" and "j" until you pointed it out.
| yawboakye wrote:
| in programming? otherwise the semi-colon has a history that
| doesn't seem to be influenced by final characters
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicolon
| qznc wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Pretty 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 wrote:
| We also have jot and tittle, from yod(y) and titulus(').
| Likewise 'not one iota'.
| gpvos wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Very interesting. An example that users of this forum will be
| familiar with is Edsger Dijkstra.
| segfaltnh wrote:
| Does this mean the correct pronunciation is "deekstra"?
| wirrbel wrote:
| no, daykstra. In the dutch of the middle-ages it might have
| been deekstra
| dep_b wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| In IPA, the name is /deikstra/. Americans (English vowels
| vary quite extremely by dialect/accent, so I'm sticking
| with Standard American English) can easily pronounce e,
| we say the word 'bed' as /bed/.
|
| But the 'ei' is a dipthong, and we don't have that
| dipthong. We have aI, as in 'bride' /braId/, which is
| what usually comes out, at least for those of us who know
| that /dZIkstr@/ is not even close to right. What you'll
| hear is generally something like /daIkstr@/, which make
| sense, as we pronounce 'dike' /daIk/ as well.
|
| So yes, completely correct, I just wanted to add the IPA
| for clarity.
| BalinKing wrote:
| To my understanding, most American and British English
| dialects[0] have /eI/, e.g. in "maze", which I imagine is
| quite close to /ei/.
|
| [0] The exceptions being dialects where it
| monophthongizes to /e:/
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| "monophthongizes" Heck of a word is that.
| BalinKing wrote:
| hey, I don't make the rules :-P
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monophthongization
| tomsmeding wrote:
| Dutch /e/ has the tendency to become /eI/ as well (not in
| Flemish, I think), so /eI/ just sounds mostly like "e" to
| us (Dutch speakers in NL). The "ij" is really /eI/, but
| because we don't really have /aI/, it turns out that /aI/
| works fine as a fairly non-ambiguous substitute.
| gpvos wrote:
| That is indeed pretty close, but not exact.
| samatman wrote:
| True, but to my ear at least, /eI/ is further from /ei/
| than /aI/ is. Maybe more to the point, English speakers
| (American ones at least) are going to "realize" the name
| Dijkstra with an /aI/ dipthong. "Dayksra" would not occur
| to us to say.
|
| Phonemes are a funny thing: if an American were to
| pronounce that last name perfectly (or a Dutch person
| speaking English, for that matter), other Americans would
| still hear /daIkstr@/, or at most, "/daIkstr@/ but it
| sounds a bit foreign".
|
| Some sounds which we don't produce are audibly not-
| English-phonemes, like German u or Scandanavian o, but
| others are not. Another example of this is that native
| English speakers aren't usually sensitive to the
| difference between the r sound in our word "pear" and the
| r sound in Spanish "pero", but recognize that "perro" is
| a different rhotic sound.
| gpvos wrote:
| It could be in several Dutch dialects (which did not take
| part in the sound shift I described), but not in the
| standard language. See the sibling replies.
| cbluth wrote:
| Don't forget the river IJ, sounds like "eye"
| stavros wrote:
| Is it "eye" or "ey"? I remember "destijl" pronounced "de
| steyl" and not "de style".
| gpvos wrote:
| It's a sound that does not exactly exist in English,
| somewhere between the diphtongized a in maze and eye. Quite
| many dialects kept the old ee pronunciation.
| Muromec wrote:
| And then kids in Amsterdam pronounce it now as I anyway
| euroderf wrote:
| And the windmill-brewery in AMS, Brouwerij 't IJ.
| kbouck wrote:
| There's also an Amsterdam movie theatre across the IJ named
| "Eye" Film. I(expat)'ve always heard dutch "ij" as an over-
| annunciated "eye" where the sides of your mouth are a more
| widely open.
| robador wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I was taught the letter y (I-grec) as part of
| the alfabet and not the ij (I'm Dutch as well). The other day I
| was surprised to see that an alfabet song that my kid was
| watching used the ij instead of the y. And I thought you were
| talking about IJsselstein, but saw there's indeed also
| Ysselsteyn, and they're not the same town (though pronounced
| the same). Interestingly we've then 3 ways to write the same
| sound (though y can also be pronounced as 'ee', e.g. Yvonne);
| y, ij, ei, oh, and I suppose 'ey' should be counted as well
| though that's not used in modern spelling. Cool
| martyvis wrote:
| My Mum is an Australian Yvonne and married my Dutch father
| Jan. When we spent a whole year in the Netherlands back in
| 1971, Dutch acquaintances would always pronounce her name
| something like Yuh-vonna, quite different to how in English
| it is said like Ee-vonn. (My Dad's name is pronounced like
| Yun of course)
|
| And yes as a 7 year old Aussie it was interesting learning
| that the digram "ij" was the 25th letter on the Dutch
| alphabet
| breakingcups wrote:
| I know several Yvonne's and we'd all pronounce it Ee-vonna.
| gpvos wrote:
| That's strange. Standard Dutch pronunciation of that name,
| transliterated back to English spelling, would be Ee-vonna.
| saghm wrote:
| One of the things that blew my mind when I took a few
| semesters of Dutch in college is that the language
| occasionally gets amended (or more precisely, the way it's
| taught in schools is amended, although after a generation or
| two of delay the effects are the same) to fix
| inconsistencies. I can't remember if clarifying 'ij' and 'y'
| was one of those, but I remember the professor telling us
| about how a while back people were upset when they updated
| the spelling of the word "pannenkoek" (which I think had
| previously been spelled "pannekoek"), which some people
| apparently still haven't gotten over after almost three
| decades[1].
|
| I wish there were enough willpower for something similar for
| English, but it's probably too late to reach any sort of
| compromise on whether to use a "u" in words like
| "color"/"colour".
|
| [1]: https://dutchreview.com/news/dutch-government-argue-
| over-spe...
| prerok wrote:
| Well, I think the difference is that for Dutch, people are
| mostly colocated, i.e. share the same space and have a
| national curriculum to guide the use.
|
| For English, it's quite different because many countries
| list it as their official language but may have diverged
| spellings and meanings and there is no single body to
| direct the curriculum. The most notable is the US vs.
| British English and the u in colo(u)r is a mere spelling
| example. Consider surgery or elevator, which are bigger
| discrepancies. I remember from my school days, as a non-
| native speaker, these were much more troublesome and we had
| a special test just to check we could tell which is which
| in US and GB English.
| daniel-s wrote:
| I think the reason is different. Some languages have
| official bodies that decree how a language works. For
| example the French have the French Academy.
|
| English has no "boss" in charge of how the language works
| and who decides what the correct anything for the
| language is. The closest are style guides, but they come
| from multiple organisations and each often different to
| each other. So, it's harder to just decide that something
| will be spelt differently.
| prerok wrote:
| Indeed, that was what I was trying to say, but you put it
| more accurately. Thanks!
| kmeisthax wrote:
| A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
|
| English had multiple attempted spelling reforms, but that
| mostly resulted in differences between American and
| British spellings of the same words. There was no central
| power to enforce a single English spelling because
| America had successfully broken off from the British
| Empire whose coercive force backed the English language.
|
| In contrast, France was extremely good at putting down
| revolutionaries in their colonies. Even when they gained
| nominal independence France would invent debts to
| impoverish their former colonies. France was _also_
| extremely good at putting down local languages, even
| within France itself. France waged a century-long
| campaign to hunt its own minority languages to
| extinction[0] and the language regulators are themselves
| part of the same infrastructure.
|
| In other words, "regular spelling" is a colonial atrocity
| and English's incomprehensible spelling rules are a
| demonstration of freedom.
|
| This can even be demonstrated in each language's attitude
| towards loanwords. English stole huge swaths of Latin,
| Greek, and French vocabulary. Text even a few centuries
| old is difficult to read and anything older than
| Shakespeare is completely inscrutable[1] as there's too
| many Germanic root words for this ostensibly Germanic
| language. Meanwhile in France, their language regulators
| fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English
| loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if
| that were a thing that needed to be stopped.
|
| Well, I suppose there is one reason why you'd want to
| stop it: loanwords make it far harder to regularize
| spelling. Think about, say, all the Japanese loanwords in
| English. Hepburn romanization[2] _tried_ to make them
| readable to English speakers, but didn 't do a great job,
| so now English has to accommodate spellings like
| _karaoke_ , _tsundere_ , or _sakura_ alongside spellings
| like _pleonasm_ , _beef_ , or _Olympic_. Good luck
| inventing a spelling system that can both faithfully
| represent the "correct" sounds for all of those words,
| while also remaining legible to present English readers,
| and being adopted in every country that speaks English to
| some degree - off the top of my head that includes
| America, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, and
| South Africa.
|
| [0] Which I suspect may have also inspired analogous
| atrocities in Canada against indigenous Canadians
|
| [1] As I put it to a native Japanese speaker: "You can
| read Genji, I can't read Beowolf."
|
| [2] Which itself isn't used by native speakers since you
| can't round-trip Hepburn to Romaji. Japan itself uses
| Kunrei-shiki romanization, it's the one that spells tsu
| as _tu_ instead of _tsu_.
| gpvos wrote:
| The few Welsh and Gaelic speakers that remain entered the
| chat.
| seszett wrote:
| > _Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight
| tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to
| stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a
| thing that needed to be stopped._
|
| That's something one hears quite often from English
| speakers but I don't really know where this myth comes
| from.
|
| French is a quite decentralised language with each
| country having its own "regulator" but none of them have
| legal power. They are all just advisory organisations.
| Many the one with the most power is the OQLF in Quebec.
| The French ministry of education decides what is taught
| in France and some of its reforms are sometimes followed
| by the other countries, but they don't deal with
| vocabulary itself, mostly orthography.
|
| The Academie Francaise does invent words, but they have
| no official value or power. Their main occupation is
| documenting actual usage.
|
| Most other European languages do have international,
| language wide regulators though, often with actual legal
| value, but French doesn't have anything like this.
|
| I think it all comes down to English speakers knowing
| even less about the other languages than they know about
| French.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with your second footnote. Beowulf
| is written in Old English, which is quite hard for modern
| English speakers to read on account of being German.
| Middle English, however, I think you'd find fairly
| palatable. For example, the Peterborough Chronicle
| (https://adoneilson.com/eme/texts/peterborough_40.html)
| is _roughly_ contemporaneous with the Tale of Genji and
| is readable by modern English speakers.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > For English, it's quite different because many
| countries list it as their official language but may have
| diverged spellings and meanings and there is no single
| body to direct the curriculum. The most notable is the US
|
| The US doesn't have an official language, though most
| institutions operate primarily in English, and all US
| states that have one or more official languages include
| English on that list.
| dhosek wrote:
| Nor does the US have an official curriculum. In the 80s,
| there was a wide variation both between and within states
| as to what a student with a high school diploma might
| have been expected to know. When the state of Illinois
| increased the graduation requirement for high school
| students from 1 to 2 years of mathematics, my high school
| added a second-year general math class because too many
| students couldn't pass pre-algebra because fractions were
| beyond their ken. (The graduation requirement was
| subsequently amended such that no math below algebra
| could be counted for graduation and then later that
| students needed to have taken at least math up to the
| level of algebra and geometry because of districts
| stretching algebra I into a two-year sequence).
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Common Core was probably the closest to a consistent
| curricula but then got bogged down in politics.
| dhosek wrote:
| Most (maybe all now?) states have standard state-wide
| curricula. Some are painfully vague, some are painfully
| detailed. When I was looking at this when I got my
| credential, it seemed like many small-to-medium sized
| states copy-pasted their curricula from other states.
| retrac wrote:
| The French do something similar, as do the Germans. They've
| had relatively little luck with substantial changes
| recently, though. The 1990 French reforms were rather
| trivial. For example. the placement of the diaeresis was
| shifted to the first vowel in some digraphs. So "aigue"
| (acute, sharp) is now "aigue" since it is two syllables,
| but the former spelling misleadingly hints at three
| syllables. That one seems to have been well-accepted. Many
| of the other reforms have been only partially accepted, or
| explicitly rejected by many speakers. (I don't think I am
| ever going to get used to "ognon" for onion.)
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The thing is that with all the regional Englishes and their
| pronunciations it would be basically impossible to settle
| on a consistent phonetic spelling.
| gpvos wrote:
| Dutch has an amazing variety of dialects. Strong dialect
| speakers from the southwest and northeast corners of the
| language area will not be able to understand each others
| dialects.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| there's only one prestige Dutch dialect though whereas
| English has multiple prestige regional dialects.
|
| It would be like if Dutch and Afrikaans had to agree on
| spellings.
| wirrbel wrote:
| A local theme park as a "dutch quarter" and I as a kid was
| always fascinated by one booth having a letter "y" in the name.
| I later learned that it was some kind of alternativ spelling
| for ij, and if you spell ij in black letters its really easy to
| see why that might have occured.
| thequux wrote:
| It's also quite common in handwriting; ij in cursive looks
| exactly like y, and even when the letters aren't all joined,
| that is a common ligature. When I studied Flemish as part of
| the integration course, all of the teachers wrote y, and so I
| presumed that it was just the done thing.
| DougN7 wrote:
| 30 years ago I knew a very old Swiss woman who told me they
| used the 'letter' ij ("yotee" if I remember correctly) instead
| of just a j (j in Swiss/German makes a y sound, like in
| jawohl). Hoping a Swiss person can fill in the details.
| monomers wrote:
| There is no standard writing system for Swiss German. So she
| might have used it, but it would be unclear to most Swiss
| what it means/how it should be pronounced.
| consp wrote:
| In Zeeuws (a Dutch dialect) many words in standard Dutch with
| an "ij" are pronounced as "ee" and written as "ie". So not
| everything has changed everywhere. (e.g. Dijk is Diek)
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Haha I was going to make a snarky comment that xij is done to
| make it look more Dutch, but its actually true!
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| My favorite part of ij is the folk transliteration to the
| character "y".
|
| In cursive script, it's easy to see how "ij" becomes "y".
| However, "y"s Unicode codepoint of U+FF means it often shows up
| as a placeholder for "unrecognized character", doubling down
| the misapprehension that "y" is the correct character in dutch
| text.
| gpvos wrote:
| My favourite parts are (1) how you can see a capital U with a
| small cutout at the bottom of the left straight line used as
| IJ, and (2) how some foreign words are mangled by Dutch
| people who are not so good at spelling, like bijoux spelled
| as byoux, which can in turn confuse foreign visitors.
| krsdcbl wrote:
| this makes so much sense - speaking German and English
| fluently, my brain always defaulted to interpret "ij" in dutch
| as "ee'" - but it took your comment to make me understand that
| it's indeed correct, and actually why
| Sharlin wrote:
| Similar flourish to the "long s" once used in English to spell
| the "ss" gemination: _possess_ or _possess_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
| nine_k wrote:
| In German, the ligature of s and s turned into a single
| character ss.
| gumby wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| There 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).
| canjobear wrote:
| Not only the romanization, also the capital form in German
| is SS.
|
| The ss sticks around in German because it prevents some
| ambiguities. For example Busse and Busse are different
| words with different pronunciations.
|
| Basically German orthography backed itself into a corner
| because of two rules: a vowel before a doubled consonant is
| short, and an s before a vowel is pronounced /z/. This
| leaves you with no clear way to write a long vowel followed
| by an /s/ sound followed by a vowel: VssV would make the
| first vowel short, and VsV would keep the first vowel long
| but the consonant would be pronounced as /z/. The ss solves
| this problem.
| NeoTar wrote:
| > The ss sticks around in German
|
| Some German. I believe it's basically abandoned in Swiss
| German.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| > I have long been puzzled by how its romanization became
| ,,ss".
|
| This might help:
| https://thelanguagecloset.com/2022/11/05/the-story-of-
| eszett...
|
| In short, it codifies a pronunciation that existed before a
| phonetic shift. The transliteration was codified after that
| same shift.
| kqr wrote:
| Here 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 wrote:
| Not a notational consideration that occurred to the Romans
| layer8 wrote:
| __ [?]-I
| politelemon wrote:
| Really 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 wrote:
| First thought, without reading article: decimal point! (How else
| can you write pi in Roman numerals?)
| mannykannot wrote:
| _So you should interpret xvij as 17, not 16. It 's part of the
| number, not something appended._
|
| The original off-by-one error?
| gumby wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| No, 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 wrote:
| > 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-
| co....
| asveikau wrote:
| I'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/.
| romanhn wrote:
| Interestingly, the OED disagrees with this (quite
| reasonably sounding) origin theory of lieutenant: https:/
| /www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2015/02/lieutenant.html
| asveikau wrote:
| I read it as supporting my theory.
|
| It says that in French of the time as heard by English
| people at the time, the phonetic value of that u was
| ambiguously heard as f or v.
|
| My position is v and u were phonetically ambiguous or
| sometimes heard as the same in Latin and romance
| languages. Maybe also in older forms of English.
| falcor84 wrote:
| >Why isn't "june" then "iune"?
|
| I'm not certain about the etymology, but many languages do
| use an "i" sound for the names of June and July. I wouldn't
| be surprised if it started with an "i", then people
| switched to writing it with a "j" while still using the
| same sound, and then later people began pronouncing it
| differently.
| saghm wrote:
| To add to the sibling comment mentioning that "v" as the
| vowel "u" was a thing in Latin historically, it does get
| used this way sometimes in "fancy" signs in English even
| today (I've seen it mostly on buildings that have Greco-
| Roman architecture styles, which is fitting). From a quick
| google, I found this [1] picture of the word "county"
| spelled with a "V".
|
| [1]: https://content.9news.com/photo/2016/08/26/citycounty2
| _denve...
| madcaptenor wrote:
| The main entrance to MIT has carved over it MASSACHVSETTS
| INSTITVTE OF TECHNOLOGY
| gorlilla wrote:
| My initial instinct was that a v is easier to engrave
| than a u because straight lines. That falls short once
| you notice all of the other curvy letters.
| dhosek wrote:
| In majuscule forms (i.e., all upper case) V was the
| normal shape for u/v while in minuscule forms (i.e., all
| lower case), u was the normal shape. This is why you'll
| see V in engravings rather than U. Albrecht Durer's _Of
| the Just Shaping of Letters_ which shows only upper-case
| forms provides a V shape but not a U shape. His textura,
| at the end of the book, has a single letter in the upper-
| case, but both u and v in the lowercase with a distinct
| base character beneath the umlaut for u.
| baking wrote:
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Massachvsetts_Ins
| tit...
| kergonath wrote:
| > Why isn't "june" then "iune"?
|
| Because it's not Latin? Things change quite a lot as
| centuries pass. But it could have been different, like in
| German, in which Juni (=June) is pronounced /iuni/.
| dhosek wrote:
| J is one of those letters that gets treated wildly
| different depending on the language. Compare Germanic and
| Slavic languages where j = /y/, French and Portuguese
| where j = /zh/, Spanish where j = /h/ (but with a bit
| more edge than English /h/, kind of halfway between /h/
| and /kh/).
| prerok wrote:
| There is no j in Latin of ancient times. Both letters v and
| j were additions in the renaissence era.
| prerok wrote:
| In roman times June was Iunius (pronounced You-nee-ew-s, or
| something like that, I am not a native English speaker).
|
| The change in the pronunciation is just centuries' worth of
| language evolution.
| lupire wrote:
| Hebrew has similar word-ending swashes: Final Kaf, Final Mem,
| Final Nun, Final Fe, Final Tzadi
| jensenbox wrote:
| This feels like some kind of weird parity but or checksum-ish
| thing.
| gregatragenet3 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| StackExchange doesn't allow AI answers. ;)
| crtasm wrote:
| The 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| x can be altered to xx; why isn't that a problem?
| burkaman wrote:
| ChatGPT just read that on Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Roman_numerals#Use_in_the_Mi..., https://samplecontents.l
| ibrary.ph/wikipedia/wp/r/Roman_numer...). Notably, Wikipedia's
| source (https://archive.org/details/materiamedica00bastgoog/pag
| e/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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| Isn'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 wrote:
| On 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.
| strken wrote:
| The source from the article doesn't sound like it's a measure
| against tampering, but instead a way to stop the patient
| receiving the wrong dose by accident. Prior to the early 1900s
| I'm pretty sure you could buy cocaine and opium over the
| counter in most of the English-speaking world, so there
| wouldn't have been any reason to alter your prescription.
|
| Edit: the source given by the article was from 1919, so it
| would have been within a couple of decades of the earlier
| laissez-faire drug policy.
| yencabulator wrote:
| My theory #1: It's not protection against forgery, it's
| protection against accidental misreads. It's less likely a
| random smear looks like an "x" of "v" than an "i", so they
| don't really benefit from the terminal marker. And "i" can
| never start a large roman numeral, so just a terminal marker is
| fine.
|
| Theory #2: It didn't start as such protection. It started as a
| typographical convention -- remember, there was a time when "i"
| and "j" weren't separate letters, "u" and "v" were not separate
| letters, and so on -- which then people started using as a
| reading guide.
| jacobolus wrote:
| I've been skimming a bunch of 16th-17th century English books
| with blackletter type recently, and the relation of to r, s
| to s, v to u, j to i, Z vs z, etc. seem generally similar,
| just typographic variants of a letter to be used
| interchangeably or with one form in the middle of a word and
| another at the end or beginning depending on the letter.
| (Disclaimer: I am not an expert on this topic.)
| jmount wrote:
| "dot the i's and cross the t's" (related to the 1919 referenced
| answer https://genealogy.stackexchange.com/a/3751 ).
| quotemstr wrote:
| They 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| It'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).
| jll29 wrote:
| i and j are both post-Roman time glyphs for the Roman numeral I
| (=1).
| throw156754228 wrote:
| TLDR last I written as a J.
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