
Roman Numerals - johndcook
http://threesixty360.wordpress.com/2011/01/01/roman-numerals-not-quite-so-simple/
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jws
IIII persists on clocks. 7 of the 8 roman numeral clock faces I found in the
house just now use IIII.

Unicode does not sanction it. There are unicode codes for digits 1 through 12,
plus L, C, D, and M, but all my "ROMAN NUMERAL FOUR" (0x2163) are rendered as
IV.

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Someone
That is not an unicode issue. Unicode does not prescribe anything about
glyphs. A font could choose to render 0x2163 as IIII or have a character
variant for it that did, if it wanted to.

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petercooper
1999 would be MDCCCCLXXXXVIIII under the subtraction-less method. Ouch. Though
it still ends up as MCMXCIX doing it the "proper" way despite IM being a cute
workaround ;-)

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wallflower
Related - I've searched for an authoritative voice on why the letter 'V' was
used in place of 'U'. Does anyone know? I do like the story about U with its
round curves being too hard to chisel, and I've not found anything besides
opinion and speculation out there.

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tedunangst
There's also no J. U/V and I/J were simply the same letter, and could be
either vowel or consonant, much like Y. Today, we transcribe it as Julius, but
it was written Iulius 2000 years ago.

There are plenty of round Roman letters carved into stone and coins. See
image. They didn't use U because they didn't know they "needed" it.

[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grabmal_des_Iulius_Ba...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grabmal_des_Iulius_Baccus.jpg)

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tedunangst
Er, that would be more like IVLIVS in real Latin. duh.

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2bit
You can still find IIII on many grandfather clocks:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IIII#IIII_and_IV>

