Sure, one symbol, but how many lines per symbol. It seems much more efficient and easy to read writing it the common way.
This would be interesting for when you have to number something and have very limited space and don’t want the arabic numbers to be written too small.
I mean lets be honest, this technique is a couple hundred years old and was never adopted or even widespread. So ofc the method we use today is the superior one.
But this is very interesting and fun to play with. For everyone doing TTRPG or LARP this is a cool concept to integrate.
I was picturing a fleet of spaceships, with their identification number painted on like this. Maybe an ancient and abandoned fleet
This is from the 13th century. So Arabic numbers were still very much growing in usage. So this would have been mainly as an alternative to Roman numerals.
To me this is better than a string of letters (the single symbol for 1993 for instance instead of MCMXCIII) but worse than Arabic numbering.
I was thinking about this one, and how it might be possible to get used to this system just as well. Neuroplasticity is so cool with how adaptable it makes us
It would be similar to writing each number out in quadrants, just with fewer lines for each digit.
7893 would become
9|3
7|8
1234 would become
3|4
1|2
It might function similar to how we read words and sentences in chunks instead of word-by-word or letter-by-letter. I imagine we already do that with some numbers, which is why we chunk numbers as 120,000.05 or 555-555-1234
This system is absolutely more efficient, using one space for 4 digits of arabic numerals, and ease of use has more to do with familiarity than anything else. You only think the “common way” is easy because it’s common to you. There are lots of number systems considered “the common way” to entire other cultures.
This is a base 10,000 system, it’s not one symbol, it’s one position. This system is only beneficial if you are crushed for physical space on a piece of paper, for today’s use case, it’s basically pointless.
It’s not really a base 1000 system. It’s base 10 attached to a line, with position denoting its power. It even has the benefit of being compound glyphs, with only 45 unique lines used (plus the spine). With a single addition this could be as expandable as Arabic.
Not bad for a numbering system that didn’t become popularized. And if you say, “Ah, but you have to add a symbol,” feel free to learn the history of zero.
