Transliteration of Greek numerals

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franzliszt13
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Transliteration of Greek numerals

Post by franzliszt13 »

Hello everybody,

I am curious about the romanization of ancient Greek numbers. I understand the system of alphabet letters corresponding to a number (α for 1, β for 2...), but how exactly are they being transliterated to contemporary texts? I have found on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanizat ... k#Numerals) that it's not a tradition of transliterating numbers to a letter (for instance β to B), nor to Arabic numerals we all use today (β to 2), but to a Roman equivalent (β to II). Do any of you have experience with it and could confirm me that indeed in the case of transliterating ancient Greek text to a present day Latin alphabet, one wouldn't use B or 2 for β, but II?

Apart from Wikipedia, I didn't manage to find any other source that could clarify it, so any insight would be greatly appreciated.

mwh
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Re: Transliteration of Greek numerals

Post by mwh »

When Greek numbers are latinized, it’s naturally the Latin system of numeration that’s used. The translation is not by individual grapheme but by the complete number. So Greek KE (25) becomes XXV, TNH (358) becomes CCCLVIII, etc. etc.* Both these systems basically use the letters of their alphabet (unlike ours, with its arabic numerals), and both, like ours, are basically decimal systems, so it’s not too difficult when you know the graphic conventions in each language. One difference is that Greek numeration (like ours) climbs consistently up, while Latin also subtracts internally (e.g. XC =(100-10)=90) and halves 10, 100, etc, as needed (e.g. XCV = 95, CL = 150). So e.g. CLIX = 159, MDIX = 1509, MMXIX = 2019.

* To decode the arithmetic: KE is 20+5, while XXV is 10+10+5;
TNH is 300+50+8, while CCCLVIII is 100+100+100+50+5+1+1+1.
So while the Latin is more cumbersome, they're both basically additive—but read on.

Hope this helps.

franzliszt13
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Posts: 15
Joined: Sat Nov 16, 2019 2:17 pm

Re: Transliteration of Greek numerals

Post by franzliszt13 »

@mwh - Thank you for the explaination of both numeral principle and transliteration. I guess it does make sense to use Roman numbers after all, since it's being transliterated to Latin alphabet (and letters with apostrophes do look kind of weird written out).

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