The REASON why Greek Numbers are Better than Roman Numerals

So, in yesterday's video on the main channel where asserted in the title that Greek numerals are way better than Roman ones, didn't actually say why, but think this is good example of why. So, it can, you know, read the Latin. This was dedicated by John Paul II, etc. But then when got to read this, was struggling like, wait, hold Yeah. Okay. Right. Of course, the the MCM is the 19. So, that's 1,900. Got it. And then, okay. Wait, hold on. And then the Okay. Then the 50. 1 2 3 82. Okay, 1982. So that's what had to do. That's however the way that it looks with the Roman numerals. But in Greek numerals, it looks like this. And if you already know what each one of these place values is, what each one of them means, then you instantly can see the number. And it's little bit more efficient. Now, it's more sophisticated system, but this is why think it could be deemed as better. love Roman numerals. love seeing them all over Rome, anywhere in the world that they're used. They're traditional. They're fantastic. And if you know Latin, if you read Latin, if you speak Latin, you need to know Roman numerals very well. Nevertheless, think Greek numerals are really, really cool. And they are something that we need to know as readers of ancient Greek and as speakers of ancient Greek. Well, don't know if speakers of ancient Greek really need to know, but the conceit is that if we're speaking ancient Greek, we are reading ancient Greek. in some ways probably better than lot of people who try to read ancient Greek but never speak the language. So it behooves us would think to get used to that part of the ancient language and culture too because the written language has those numbers. So think Roman numerals are awesome and they're part of written Latin certainly part of the ancient language and we should maintain our competency with Roman numerals but also with the Greek numerals. After I'd already uploaded the video yesterday, someone gave me the idea, hey, why don't you make flashc cards for these and realized, that's great idea. That is flashcards for the Greek numerals. So, did that and you see my ani over here and the flashcards. put on my online store, so you can download these in case you want to want to do that. However, you could make them yourself. It takes several hours though to make something like that. And for it to work, had to actually test it, make sure it worked. This is something that you get with it which is spreadsheet of every single number. Here's the Greek numeral. Here's the Arabic numeral and the word in cardinal and ordinal in ancient Greek and all the numbers. All of them all the way up to 9,999. Yeah, that's lot. Right there they are. And 3,774. That's 3,00 that's 700 and that's 74. And we see. So they're all there. So that's pretty cool. And each one of them is also one of these flashcard decks. So let's see. how about we do the big thing, which is the Arabic numerals and Greek numerals. already did few of these yesterday. actually made these for myself cuz wanted to master them. But if you get them, the way that they're given to you is in order. already did the first dozen or so yesterday. And if you don't know what Anki is, just look it up, Google it. It's free flashcard program. It's free on the computer. The app itself, which I'm using here, is free on the computer, but there's also web version which works virtually the same way, especially if you just want to review cards. That is, you want to use it to practice whatever you're you're learning, whatever if you're learning something for language, it's called Anki, cuz that's the Japanese word for memory. As recall, the creators made it in order to remember Japanese kanji, think, or Japanese vocabulary. Anyway, so you get 13 and then you have to guess it. And what's this 13 look like? Of course, it's the iota gamma. Now, the way you could then use this, you have piece of paper. You write them down every time as you're going through. And if you remember them, you could say, "Good." And then for 14, what was that? It's the iota delta. And but if you didn't remember that, you might you'd hit again and then it'll be back within 1 minute. If it's hard, less than 6 minutes. If it's good, less than 10 minutes. And if it's easy, in 5 days. And the 15. And sometimes actually if want to randomize these things, go through and there's actually and know them well. pick them and go to the opposite side. So this is one way you can do it. If go through these little bit, I'll get to the point where they switch over. So there's the Greek side. If you see that on site, say the word in English. What is it? 12. Very good. So that's how you would do it. And you say good. And it's like, what is this? This is 13. You might be it's hard. 14. Maybe that's easy. 15 16 and so forth. So Anki is spaced repetition program. These cards will come back to you in regular intervals. It was the first time you're seeing them. It's going to be few minutes till you see them again unless you mark them as easy. After that it'll be some days after that more days, more weeks. The idea is you want to try to remember something just before you forget it because that's the way to really strengthen the memory. Rather than seeing it whole bunch of times, all at once, all on the same day, you form lasting memory, pushing it from short to medium to long-term memory by waiting as long as possible before you forget it. And space repetition systems like this tend to work pretty well for hitting that sweet spot for most people. So, Ani is great. highly recommend it. The app on the phone is paid. Like, you have to pay for that, but I've never bought it cuz just use the web version on my phone because that's how it's designed. It's not quite as powerful as having the full app, but really don't need that. can use this on my computer for all the full features that are in the app on the computer, which is free. And if I'm mobile and just want to review cards, then the web version is fine. It's called Anki Web. Very easy. Look it up on Google or YouTube and you'll you'll figure out how to do it. It's pretty easy. The other decks have are the Arabic numerals and cardinal Greek numbers. These give you the number. How do you say that in Greek? Very good. There it is. So, that's good. 14. Very good. So here we can actually learn the Greek words. That's something know people would like to do. Now the ancient Greek by the Rainiary dallying method has all the cardinal numbers through 100 and then bunch after that through the the thousands up to 10,000 just only samples though. So if you want to use audio to memorize that is terrific way. That's why recommend it. But of course with that audio book ancient Greek by the rearian deling method you get all the spreadsheets for the paradigms the verb. So it's actually that's what it's really for. The numbers are just an incidental thing that thought were were useful. But when it comes to getting chance to be quizzed on each of the words as well as now the Greek numerals themselves like gamma omega kappa with little gaya on the bottom 3,820 just got to know that. How would you get good at that? This is way you can do it. What else do we have here? Arabic numerals and the ordinal numbers the cardinals and the ordinals. What is that as the ordinal? Very good. There you go. There you go. Then getting quizzed with the Greek numerals with the cardinal Greek numbers. So here we have this. What is that in Greek? What's the Greek word for this number? There it is. Penta. Also thought should mention that hexa sometimes written but hea is probably how it was always pronounced. Right. And think you get the idea there. And then the same thing with the ordinal numbers. What is the Greek numeral for that? For the 14th iota delta with the little kaha is right. Very good. And pmpon kaiaton. So you get the idea. You go through these and this is honor system, right? So if you feel this is hard or easy for you, that's why you would mark them as one or the other. also think it's awesome just to see all these Greek numerals all the way to 999. By the way, I'm going to tell you how we do above 10,000 today. mentioned you could do the little Korea plus iota yesterday. Apparently that exists. There's better way. It's called myriad notation, which I'll show you little bit later in this video. But yeah, isn't it awesome? And look, just want to prove it to you. did it. Put these all the way all the way down to 9,999. And there's the ordinal, too. Isn't that awesome? Now, for you, if you're just getting started with this, then probably the given order is very good. And that might be good for you for long time. And after few days, after you get up through 100 or into the hundreds, depending how many cards you see day, cuz you can see more than 25, you're going to have to specify that in your settings in your version of Anki. Anki is so customizable. That's what makes it so awesome. But one thing that it does that really like here, if go to options for this deck, can change the order to random. Apparently, there's other ways to do this, but this seems to work fine for me. So now, if click on this one, the Greek numerals and the ordinal Greek numbers. So now am prompted with this Greek ordinal number which is Pentakis he all right it's quiz time and you can try too so okay he right remember that oneost hectone this is my answer let's see if I'm right And am right. Huzzah. And of course that in English is 5,7 5,700 30th6th or as we normally say it 5,736th most use for me especially for trying to get comfortable with with the Greek numerals themselves. Here we go. So Arabic numerals to Greek numerals. 18. Okay. Well, yeah, that's easy, but I'll do it anyway just for funsies. That is this one on the bottom and show answer. There we go. The numeral, the Greek numeral for 9,000. Okay. 500, right? 6. Here it is. This is my answer. Show answer. And there it is. Huzzah. So, I'll say that's good. And that is is this the same exact one? Yeah, that's the same exact one. Very good. We'll call that good. So, here's another 3,00 900 3,00 97. Okay, there's my answer. And there it is. 3,997. So, this is fun. And then if you're nerd like me, you may find this very useful. And you don't need to download my Anki decks. You can certainly make your own. just saved you heap of time by making the spreadsheet and making the slides for you. So getting back to why feel that Greek numerals are quote unquote better. think it comes to the legibility in part. Now love how they look. love Roman numerals very much. But this one character here on the Greek side corresponds to this. But we don't necessarily know that yet. We have to keep reading left to right until we get up to something else because it could be two M's next to each other and that would be 2,000. So we have to actually read parts of it and recursively go back and forth to understand it. So we get to 1,100. it's 1,100. Nope. This whole all of that is the 900 because it's 100 before th00and. So okay. So this is the first place value and that's the second place value. Okay, then we get it's 50. Okay, so it's so it's 50. Queen guinta for speaking Latin. Nope, it's not 50 because we have to account for another Okay, so it's 60. Nope, it's 70. No, it's eight. Do have to go any further? No. So this place value corresponds to this. And this is both mathematically place value as well as word both in Latin and ancient Greek, right? It's oda octaga in Latin. So you can't just read these letter by letter. You have to see the whole thing and then you have to go through number of at first conscious processes to figure out what place value each of these characters belongs to. And it occurred to me while editing this is we actually have this problem while trying to read Arabic numerals. Take 1,982. We see one, but how do we know that that's 1,00 and not simply 1 or 19 or 198? We have to read the whole number all the way to the end before we begin to utter the first word to know what place value it even corresponds to. So, obviously, we're very used to Arabic numerals. They have huge amount of advantages. But actually, this is one distinct disadvantage for the Arabic numerals with respect to the Greek numerals. And there's nothing bad about that. think it's awesome. think it's cool. It's beautiful. It's fun, but there's something little bit more efficient on the Greek side because each one of these characters is exactly one number and word that fits into the place value. This is different even than what we do in the Arabic numerals because with the Arabic numerals, this is could be 9 or 900 or 9 million. It could be anything. Could be 9,000. It could be anything because it's much more abstract thing. And that makes Arabic numerals probably and think obviously better for the broad range of mathematics that we engage with when it's so easy to put place value. Now this is just with that little dot. This is one/10enth of that previous value. And now it's hundredth and thousandth. Of course the non-angle Europeans will use comma instead of decimal dots. I'll just do decimal comma which is great. That's fine. But the point is that Arabic numerals are super versatile. But as someone was actually mentioning in the comments of the video on the main channel, thought this was very clever. People can cheat with this for whatever reason. Maybe it's money. You add zero, suddenly you're getting 10 times as much money or hundred times or thousand times, right? Or that could be fractionated to even less. You know, you could, you know, the the company owes this much or only this much. So, it's very interesting how this can be manipulated so easily either by the person managing the accounts or someone else who's going in there to change the accounts illicitly who's not part of the company. Who knows? And I'm thinking mostly in the pre-digital age anyway when this was all on paper. When these numbers are written on paper in Greek, each one of these is that place value. And it's much harder to manipulate them. You have to basically change all of it. You can't just move decimal or add zero or something like that. It's much more flexible system, but has the potential for more manipulation or even ambiguity. And this is probably the exact reason that on the traditional check, in addition to the Arabic numeral quantity, you have to write out the words because the words are totally true and correct and can't be so easily manipulated. So if you make mistake where you put the decimal point or whatever, it can be confirmed by the written word. But with the Greek numeral system, this seems less necessary because as we've stated, each one of these letters is specific place value and can't easily be confused. These are unambiguous. This is exactly what they are. Again, the Roman side, it's also oof, you know, you have all these things and if it were 10 before thousand, you put the before it's like the kind of counting backwards. It's really cool. It looks neat. like the system of the Roman numerals, but the Greek one just think is is better. Another thing, too, is we could use the capitals for all these. And so, here's samp. By the way, someone mentioned how this is actually medieval kind of notation. Well, the all lower cases are fundamentally medieval, so don't mind that. My problem with using the stigma or the stigma shape of the diagramama if we want to say they're totally merged that that the Byzantine cursive diagramama and the stigma are identical. Okay, let's say that's the case. Well, these are still not the same category of thing exactly cuz we have lowercase diagramama which isn't quite as fancy and the capital always would look like this. It would never look like this because again that's capital stigma, not the capital diagramama which is always like this. So that's it when it comes to capitalizing the samp. These are the archaic ones and I'm glad there's unic code that exists for these. These actually aren't on the English Greek numerals Wikipedia page. Just on the Italian one and maybe some of the others, but not the English one. This apparently is the capital one though. And this is the minuscule. don't know how that works, but I'm just going to don't know. Do you want me to use the the quote unquote capital one here? guess can. Now look at it's like, yeah, guess because it's not going below the line or this one goes below the line. Yeah. Okay. Well, all right. So that's the capital sampi. That's fine. Kind of neat. Kind of looks cool. But don't think we should bother using these because it just leads to the fact that this is 300. So the capital, if we're using capital Greek numerals, why why do that to ourselves? These are the capital is almost indistinguishable. Let's use something that looks really interesting and separate. This is the liature stigma. That is what it is. that the diagram gamma in the cursive fancy writing that is actually way weirder than our normal lowercase letters happen to merge with it. Okay, mean if you want to that's fine but that's not really what the number is. You can use this form but it is and always was diagama. So that said here it is in capital form capital man actually it looks even cooler than the lowercase. the lowercase love the look of and think it's easier to write and little bit easier to read but this is pretty awesome. Now you could use the underbar for the for the thousand's place and the overbar for the hundreds, tens, and ones. In any case, this is just it's also takes up less space than this. Now, it depends on what numeral it is, but generally think that the advantage with the Greek numeral system is that one letter per place value. That's always true. Here's the chart again. As you can see, each place value only gets one letter. Now, sometimes they're missing. We don't have the unlisted place values. We use zeros in the Arabic system. know, by the way, that the Arabic numerals come from the Hindu numerals originally or Indian numerals, but wouldn't call these Indian numerals because the shapes of them are rather different in those writing systems where these are really close to the Arabic ones in their shape, the ones we use in the various European languages like English. So here we have no place value. We have nothing else after it that fills in the other things. But if you think about the words, so we have anakis, are there any words that follow that? No. Are there any Greek numerals that follow the theta? No. What about 99? Well, we have the two thetas together and we only have two words, Anakiskilia and na. that's neat. for 9,042, we have the theta for the 9,000, the 40 with the mu and the beta for the two. So, we have three Greek numeral symbols and we have three words. Anakiskeilia tetraont. It's kind of nifty actually. Here again, there's zero in 9,16. The 10's place has no representative, so it has zero to fill it in. The Greek numerals don't have zero in that position. We have the low korea with the theta followed by row followed by the diagramama. So we have three Greek numerals and we have anakiskelia hecaton hex. So this is something think is very neat. As soon as we get to four full digits without any zeros, 9,114, we have all four digits in here. And even though the teens are little weird, anakisia hecatona, that's kind of two words. wrote them together because like them that way. Handa are little bit exceptional. Let's go to anything past the teens, though. And we see 9,128. There are four Greek numeral symbols. think that's pretty cool that whenever there's zero that goes in the Arabic term, it's not represented by Greek numeral, but there's also no word for it either that we actually utter. think that's pretty cool due to the English. By the way, as for the copa, this is the ancient letter, but this is how it gets simplified similar to the diagramama and also to the samp to the point where it's used just as numeral in all the medieval manuscripts. And that's why it has this form to the present day. I'm fine with these. But since it is kpopa and it is an actual letter that's used to write stuff, why not do that one? But it doesn't confuse anything. If you like this one, think that's fine. There's two ways you could go. you go with full old school which would be this for the sampama and this for the copa. don't want to use this one for the samp because it looks too much like what we need for 300 which are the towel letters here. think the samp fine no problem. I'm pretty much indifferent to that but like you know the old letter. think it looks better too all the letters put together. Someone else in the other video is I'm not actually sure that this is ever used for 10,000 that is an iota with the kaha at the bottom before or as an underscore because there is something called myriad notation where you take the capital mu and then above it you write which 10,000 is. So that is 10,000 and then this would be 20,000 these right and this would be 100,000 cuz it's an iota 11,000 and so forth and after that you could write the rest of your normal like 10,000 4 or whatever it is. sorry without this thing not that that's I'm thinking of four 4,000 not four. So this would be 80,1002. Now think of trying to do that with the Roman numerals. is like, how do we get to the higher values? and it, it gets less and less easy the the higher you go up, of course. But, anyway, yeah, this is definitely one of the reasons like this Greek numeral notation. On the main video, lot of people have put some really useful pneummonics, and want to share couple with you that could remember off the top of my head for 400. Remember, didn't have anything. Well, someone suggested, okay, you got 400, right? That's what the oopsilon is for. But 400. Uhhuh. See what they did there? think that's great one. And then for the five, which is for 500. Well, don't know why didn't even think of this. It's actually brilliant. 500. Like there you go. There you go. That's the answer. 500. And thought that was very clever. Another is that for 800 which is omega well the omega turned on its side looks like an eight if you especially if you put two of them together. So that's good pneummonic. As for 10 someone thought of well okay this is number 10. There it is in Arabic notation. Well you think of this letter name which is iota. He's spelling it you know either Greek or even the the Roman way. It looks pretty much the same. And there's 10. Does that help? think that's pretty cool. Good job to the person who suggested that one. don't give your names because YouTube has taken away the names. It's just like this at whatever. It's just the the handle that we've all been forced to accept now. So, apologize if don't say you by name cuz normally it's just bunch of numbers or other letters. So, anyway, if you know who you are, thank you. As for number four, someone suggested, well, our number four has delta shape in it. Kind of, There it is. Just like the capital delta. So that's pretty good for number four. Someone suggested that the letter sigh which represents the number 700 looks like manora and the person said that the manora has seven places for the candles and that's the way to remember 700. someone else suggested that the sigma I'm not sure which form. Well guess this one kind of looks like two. One of them looks kind of like two visually. So you can use that too. These pneummonics though, what's nice about them is you only really need them for if you're doing this lot or if you're using the flash cards or something, maybe few days and then you'll just get used to recognizing something like this as number and you'll read it as number just as much. Well, maybe not just as easily, but similar to how you would read an Arabic numeral. another one for four that forgot. If you take the oopsilon for the 400, put little tick underneath and it's like, hey, it looks kind of like four. It's like, yeah, that's good one, too. If you have any more suggestions, you can put them under this video or under the main channel video for your pneummonics because this is awesome. This is great way to remember because we just if we're doing anything with ancient Greek, we need to learn these eventually. One more little pneummonic that Greek member of the audience mentioned is that they learn for the 110 hundred's place so if that helps you remember to get to the ones place you start with the alpha and then the iota for the 10's place so that means that 20 is kappa and 30 is lambda and so forth and that row starts off the 100. So row is 100 sigma is 200 tow is 300 and so forth and so on. So, thanks for watching this video and definitely check out the video on the main channel if you haven't seen it yet. And yeah, any more ideas on pneummonics or stuff like that or if you really love Roman numerals more than Greek numerals, then it would be fun to hear that too. Let me know. Just stay.