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Comment by tylerneylon | Hacker News Reader

I had heard that IV might be considered sacrilegious, as the god Jupiter would have once been spelled IVPPITER, as I was used for modern J and V for modern U.

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There is a similar thing with Hebrew numerals¹ where 15 and 16 are usually written as תו and תז to avoid what would otherwise be forms of the name of God.

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1. The Hebrew numeral system, like the Greek numeral system is an almost-decimal system in that different letters are used for each of the different values, but the letters change by place value as well as by their individual value, so, e.g., 21 is written כא where כ stands for 20 and א stands for 1.

To clarify, those are 9 + 6 and 9 + 7; the forms to be avoided would be 10 + 5 and 10 + 6.

Interesting. I wonder if this is related to how Germans count/pronounce numbers. 21 in your example is "einundzwanzig" in German (or "ein-und-zwanzig", "one-and-twenty")

I think in this case it’s because Hebrew is read right to left, so unrelated.

Yep. The reversed order is also something that you see in archaic English, for example the nursery rhyme, “four and twenty blackbirds”

Japanese changed a couple too. From memory the pronunciation/written form of 4(?) was changed in some cases because it resembled death

In Japanese its often the case that a kanji has different ways of reading it, so it's not just that.

The only Japanese number form change I’m aware of is a special form for one (一) (and possibly two 二) to prevent them from being altered on checks into three (三), but I’m far from an expert.

Minor correction: that's טו and טז.

אבגדהוזחט - count one through nine

יכלמנסעפצ - count ten through ninety

קרשת - count one hundred through four hundred

so תו would be 406 while טו is 9+6=15

D’oh that’s what I get for trusting my mediocre Hebrew keyboarding skills. For those who don’t know the Hebrew alphabet, both ת and ט are commonly transcribed as T (the former often as TH, but it’s meant to be a German aspirated T sound rather than the English th).

This is the same explanation I was given. In Roman times it was common to only write the first few letters of a word, just enough to be able to extrapolate the full word from the context. IV was a common abbreviation for IVPPITER.

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