Cherokee Numerals
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Cherokee Numerals
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Re: Cherokee Numerals
#2Sounds like no loss. Invented and used by one person. We surely all invent and use our own personal ad-hoc notations for things when we don't happen to already know a conventional one.
Re: Cherokee Numerals
#3It's also interesting how history has taken us to the point that an anthropologist names a numeral system invented in India and brought to Europe via Africa "Western", because readers will understand that name, and uses that name in contrast to a system that was invented in the actual West.
Also, not enough is made of the fact that the numeral system was based upon United States decimal coinage. Viewed in terms of 1 cent, 5 cent, and 10 cent coins, with the added notion of a barred gate for 1 to 5 (as explained), the numerals actually make a lot of sense; especially if one considers them as erosions into arcs and squiggles caused by rapidly drawing the original full circles and bars.
* 1 to 5 are the five-barred gate with the downward bars mostly elided or reduced to squiggles for speed and the pen not removed from the paper in between bars.
* 6 to 10 are a 5 cent piece reduced to an arc plus one to five 1 cent pieces as bars, again mostly elided.
* 11 to 15 are a 10 cent piece still mostly a circle plus one to five 1 cent pieces.
* The 30 to 90 symbols are the superscript notation described in Lowery's biography, but prefixed instead of suffixed. 50, for example, is a prefixed 5, as reduced to a squiggle, before a 10 cent piece.
The text states that numerals above 20 had the numerals from 1 to 9 appended. By implication, therefore: 16 to 25 are a 10 cent piece, plus a 5 cent piece, plus one or two barred gates of 1 cent pieces; and 26 to 29 are a 10 cent piece, plus two 5 cent pieces, plus some 1 cent pieces.
It would appear that Sequoyah didn't encounter 25 cent pieces often enough to warrant retaining them in the system as it evolved.
Re: Cherokee Numerals
#4It's also interesting how history has taken us to the point that an anthropologist names a numeral system invented in India and brought to Europe via Africa "Western", because readers will understand that name, and uses that name in contrast to a system that was invented in the actual West. Also, not enough is made of the fact that the numeral system was based upon United States decimal coinage. Viewed in terms of 1…
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Re: Cherokee Numerals
#5Wow, this is dense.
> From the Egyptian hieratic numerals used in almost all the quotidian tasks of the Egyptian state, to the traditional Sinhalese numerals of south India and Sri Lanka, or the Siniform numerals developed for the Jurchin script in 12th-century China, ciphered-additive numeration is cross-culturally recurrent.
In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian, and the whole sentence is terrifying. I'm fine with looking up definitions, but as a native speaker who's pretty well-read, I find this text really hard to read without a dictionary. There were many words undefined (even by context) in the text that I really don't think even most above-average readers know: syllabary, biscriptal, intelligentsia, interlocutor, grapheme, elided.
Made me think of a recent PG essay: http://paulgraham.com/simply.html
Re: Cherokee Numerals
#6Wow, this is dense. > From the Egyptian hieratic numerals used in almost all the quotidian tasks of the Egyptian state, to the traditional Sinhalese numerals of south India and Sri Lanka, or the Siniform numerals developed for the Jurchin script in 12th-century China, ciphered-additive numeration is cross-culturally recurrent. In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian, and the whole sentence…
There's a very simple trick: for an overview reading, it doesn't matter what those words mean.
Just skip over them: From the Egyptian some-class-of numerals used in almost all the some-kind-of tasks of the Egyptian state, etc.
(Also, welcome to reading a text for which you are perhaps not the target audience. Now think about all the computing jargon that we tend to just take for granted in our own writing...)
Re: Cherokee Numerals
#7It's also interesting how history has taken us to the point that an anthropologist names a numeral system invented in India and brought to Europe via Africa "Western", because readers will understand that name, and uses that name in contrast to a system that was invented in the actual West. Also, not enough is made of the fact that the numeral system was based upon United States decimal coinage. Viewed in terms of 1…
> It's also interesting how history has taken us to the point that an anthropologist names a numeral system invented in India and brought to Europe via Africa "Western", because readers will understand that name, and uses that name in contrast to a system that was invented in the actual West.
It is true that place value systems originated in India, but I would personally say that calling our numeral system ‘Indian’ would be no less incorrect than calling it ‘Western’. The history is more complicated (and more interesting!) than such names would imply:
• The shapes of our modern numerals originated in the Brāhmi script of ancient India, around 300 BCE (𑁦𑁧𑁨𑁩𑁪𑁫𑁬𑁭𑁮𑁯).
• Place-value systems are much younger; the first date from around 500 CE. By this time the original shapes of the numerals had already been heavily altered, becoming more similar to the modern Hindu numerals (०१२३४५६७८९).
• These systems were then transmitted to Persia, where they evolved into the numeral system used in Persian (۰۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹) and thence Arabic (٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩).
• It was only at this point that the Arabic numerals were transmitted to Europe primarily via Fibonacci; over a few centuries they evolved into their modern forms (0123456789). Wikipedia calls this numeral set ‘Western Arabic’, and I do think this is a more correct name than either ‘Western’ or ‘Indian’.
Re: Cherokee Numerals
#8It's also interesting how history has taken us to the point that an anthropologist names a numeral system invented in India and brought to Europe via Africa "Western", because readers will understand that name, and uses that name in contrast to a system that was invented in the actual West. Also, not enough is made of the fact that the numeral system was based upon United States decimal coinage. Viewed in terms of 1…
Curiously I have never heard of it as Western numerals, but only as Arabic, and that's how I learned at school.
Re: Cherokee Numerals
#9Cherokee syllabary [1] is interesting itself - it incorporates variety of characters that look like Latin and other Old World scripts letters but obviously have a different meaning.
Re: Cherokee Numerals
#10Sounds like no loss. Invented and used by one person. We surely all invent and use our own personal ad-hoc notations for things when we don't happen to already know a conventional one.
Radix Positional notation is just one way to represent numbers. A way that is better for arithmetic than arbitrary numerals certainly. However it's important to remember that alternatives give us a comparison. A way of seeing implicit detail. Who knows, maybe someone will invent a better notation one day, and those future humans will look back and wonder why we didn't see the obvious solution!