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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

It's weird nothing in the Stackexchange answer makes the point about the letters not being separate. In Latin (at least during the Middle Ages) J and I were used interchangeably. It was simply a matter of style or, at times, the random whim of the scribe. A person's name might start with a J and then in the same document be an I. As for numerals, tacking a J (or really what often just looked like an I with a longer straight descender) was common in late medieval Gothic scripts.

Forgery doesn't make sense, yeah. You gave some reasons, but also western medieval and early modern conceptions of forgery, for instance, were very different than our modern one. Ease of reading and clarity makes sense.

Nothing in the answer (or anywhere in this thread) distinguishes "when". It don't doubt that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the "j" was used in this way, but that might not have always been the case.

I've been skimming a bunch of 16th–17th century English books with blackletter type recently, and the relation of ꝛ to r, ſ to s, v to u, j to i, ʒ 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.)

There is an old German idiom for deceiving or defrauding somebody that roughly translates to "faking an X for a U". It's origin is people turning "v" into "x" on bar tabs or records. Given that this made it into an idiom and far outlived the use of roman numerals I assume this used to be a very relatable experience once upon a time.

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"

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.

In Japanese and Chinese, there are alternate numerals used on bank notes that have more strokes and therefore can't be amended. The normal number 1 is 一 and the fancy bank version is 壹.

壹 looks kind of like a drone landing on a flower pot.

Sold.

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.

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