Letters and Numbers

Have you ever wondered where our letters and numbers come from? Maybe you have cursed at how difficult writing is at some point, or you hated maths back in school. Let me tell you: It could have been worse, much worse!

As it is, we got our letters from the Romans, and our numbers from the Arabs. We definitely got the better from both cultures. Our numbers use the decimal system, which makes it easy to calculate with them. Take written additions and subtraction, for example. Since you have the ones, tens, hundreds and so on neatly one below the other, it doesn't take much effort to add or subtract even large numbers.

Our letters, on the other hand, may be complicated for children when they first start learning them, but they are pretty easy to distinguish from one another.

Now imagine we had got our numbers from the Romans and our letters from the Arabs. Have you ever had to calculate with Roman numbers? German school children are required to do it in sixth year, and let me tell you, it is very confusing. To give you an example of what our maths lessons could have been all those years:

1 = I
5 = V
10 = X

Now, some easy additions:

2+2=4 -- II+II=IV
4+6=10 -- IV+VI=X
4+8=12 -- IV+VIII=XII

Confused? Let's continue with some easy subtractions:

5-1=4 -- V-I=IV
7-4=3 -- VII-IV=III
23-5=17 -- XXIII-V=XVII

Now, if you have ever seen Arabic writing, you will probably appreciate that our ancestors decided to use Latin letters instead. It looks beautiful, but at least to me, it also looks very difficult.

Seems like our ancestors made some good decisions, huh?