display

Louis XIV becomes Louis 14. The Sun King of France becomes something that reads like a gamer's username.

At least in the Louvre and in the Musée Carnavalet, the museum for the history of the city of Paris.

The latter has announced that it will replace Roman numerals on the explanatory boards with the Indo-Arabic numbers that are commonly used today.

In France this has led to a tempête de merde among cultural pessimists.

The announcement was even more scandalized in Italy.

2073 years after Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul, the descendants of the Romans are concerned that their cultural influence in France is waning.

The skeptics regard the change in the spelling of numbers as a surrender to the stupidity of new generations.

And they mourn the abolition of an old European cultural asset in favor of an import from the Islamic area.

display

It is feared that if the museums as educational institutions no longer even trust that their visitors understand the basically quite simple Roman numerical system (we're talking about ordinal numbers below 100 or Roman C, not fantastic billions), then the next would be History books and the ordinal numbers of the administrations of Roman-free zones.

A new downfall of Rome after the pillage by Vandals, Goths and the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD.

The Roman numerals lost their defensive struggle against the numerals from the Orient in the late Middle Ages, when the pioneering Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci spoke out in favor of using the Indo-Arabic numerals that he had got to know in North Africa.

The fatal blow was then given to them by a German in the early modern times: after Adam Riese or Ries, the Indo-Arabic numbers were immeasurably superior to the Roman ones - among other things because they have the versatile number 0, which did not exist among the Romans.

The Greeks also wrote numbers with letters

Since the 16th century, V (5), X (10), L (50), C (100), M (1000) as well as other variants and the numbers composed of these simple digits have been out of use in mathematics.

The Romans had never really expected them either, they only used them to write down the results they had gotten with fingers, abacus and abacus.

display

Before the Romans, when they invented arithmetic, the branch of mathematics to which the four basic arithmetic operations also belong, the Greeks had already proven that one can calculate without Arabic numbers.

Like the Romans, the Greeks wrote their numbers with letters.

The innovative minds of the Asian Minor city of Miletus shared in the middle of the 4th century BC.

The alphabet in three groups of nine characters each for the representation of the ones, the tens and the hundreds.

For this, three old letters - digamma Ϝ, koppa Ϙ and sampi Ϡ - which no longer appear in the classical Greek alphabet, were used as numerals.

Alpha Α to theta Θ stood for 1 to 9, kappa Κ to koppa Ϙ for 10 to 90, rho Ρ to sampi Ϡ for 100 to 900.

Even if in the late Byzantine Empire in the 14th century BC

When the Indian-Arabic numerical system prevailed in the 3rd century BC, the old alphabetical number writing is still in use and generally understandable in Greece: It is used, for example, for the names of rulers, just as we and the French still order them with Roman numerals.

School classes are also counted according to the old system: the fifth class is the epsilon Ε class.

The Romans then adopted the idea of ​​writing numbers with letters from the Greeks - via the Etruscans and other older peoples of the Italian peninsula.

There are many reasons why the Roman numerals survive to this day, alongside the Indo-Arabic numerals, in our everyday lives.

Because of the traditional prestige of these numbers, they are used for the names of monarchs: Wilhelm II, Charles V and Louis XIV. The French proceed a little differently than the Germans: They call the Sun King Louis quatorze, which is literally Louis fourteen would have to be translated - not Ludwig the Fourteenth.

display

For purely graphic reasons, Roman numerals are also used on clock faces, when numbering volumes of books or rooms in buildings.

In the case of file numbers or other long combinations of digits, a mixture of Indian-Arabic and Roman numerals has the advantage that the code digits are easier to structure and more legible.

All of this will not go out of use in France for the time being.

A spokeswoman for the Musée Carnavalet is quoted on France Inter, saying that only about 170 of the 3000 or so explanatory panels are being adjusted so that the names of rulers and centuries will be read with Arabic numerals.

The changes that have long been common in the Louvre and the British Museum in London are being made to meet the needs of non-European visitors, who often don't know what to do with Roman numerals.

The aim is to make the information more accessible to foreigners and people with mental disabilities.

But even in explanations for children, the old traditional spelling would continue to be used.

The new fall of Rome has therefore been canceled for the time being.