[B-Greek] Greek numbers
Ben Crick
ben.crick at argonet.co.uk
Wed Apr 5 15:16:09 EDT 2006
On Tue 4 Apr 2006 (13:17:16), dmooney at atmc.net wrote:
> I have recently bought a NT Greek book for 101 Students of the languge.
> I am still struggling with learning Greek although I learned German
> rather easily. But I did have a question the book did not address: Were
> Greek numbers spelled out or did they use merely symbols for greek
> numbers? I know in the MSS we have the numbers are spelled out but the
> church I attended when I was growing up claimed the numbers were
> represented by single letters or symbols in the original autographs and
> only later were switched over to spelled out words. If this is so did
> the LXX spell out Greek numbers or did they merely use symbols?
Dear David,
You will find stuff on this in the b-Greek archives. But here is a
reply I originally submitted to another List:
>> It is by no means certain that the alphabetical letters now assigned
to the numbers 1-9, 10-90, 100-900, were so assigned since antiquity.
For instance, in Greek, the obsolete letters Digamma and Qoppa and Sampi
are used to represent 6, 90 and 900 because the Greek alphabet only
has 24 letters, not the necessary 27. Digamma is also known as Stigma,
because it looks like a ligature of Sigma and Tau.
1 alpha 10 iota 100 rho
2 beta 20 kappa 200 sigma
3 gamma 30 lambda 300 tau
4 delta 40 mu 400 upsilon
5 epsilon 50 nu 500 phi
6 [digamma] 60 xi 600 chi
7 zeta 70 omicron 700 psi
8 eta 80 pi 800 omega
9 theta 90 [qoppa] 900 [sampi]
Thus the favourite "Number of the Beast", 666, is Chi Xi Stigma in
Greek numerals. If you think that is odd, try it in Hexadecimal, 29A.
In Latin, we have the curiosity that 666 = DCLXVI, employing every
Latin numerical-letter (except M) just once in reverse order of
magnitude. 1666 MDCLXVI was the year of the Great Fire of London.
A drawback with Greek numerals (and Roman) is that there is no
symbol for Zero. This probably caused Dionysius Exiguus to miss out
the year Zero between 1BC and 1AD. The above table only applies to
Greek numerals after the 2nd century BC approx. Before that there
was no agreed standard, because each independent Greek city-state
used its own system and would not co-operate. There were the Attic
System, the Ionian System, and the Milesian System from about the
6th century BC. Modern Greece uses the Arabic decimal notation,
except for chapter numbers in the Bible and other places where we
would normally use Roman numerals.
See O.A.W. Dilke, MATHEMATICS AND MEASUREMENT (London: British Museum
Publications, 1987)<<
ERRWSQE
Ben
--
Revd Ben Crick, BA CF ZFC Hf
<ben.crick at NOSPAM.argonet.co.uk>
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