Cistercian Numbers

11 hours ago (omniglot.com)

My minuscule pet peeve is that having only one source where the number 5 is depicted with a triangle (all others show it as a separated segment, like the number 6 but shorter), that's how every article or library draws it. It's all because the guy who wrote a book about them saw that source first so he based his figures on it.

Here's a small summary about the numbers with many examples: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20290-cistercian-digits.pdf

  • It might not be accurate but it does seem like it'd be easy to mistake a 5 and 6 without the triangle. Especially when the characters are being hurriedly written by hand. If I were going to use this system, I'd be sticking with the triangle.

  • It would never have occurred to me that anyone would want to get these into a Unicode standard. This document you linked is excellent, thank you.

It's pretty cool but I'm surprised there wasn't confusion among the 2s (2 & 200, 20 & 2000) all the other symbols had enough to make it clear which side they're on, but the closer the 2-notch gets to the centre, the more ambiguous it gets. Could even be confused with a 1 if you're not careful

I am a little sad that bare zero is not represented. This is my first exposure to Cistercian numbers but it looks like a unadorned staff would fit for the bare zero.

The whole thing is a lot of fun, feels like a Myst puzzle. Or more accuratly, I don't think Myst had a number puzzle but Riven did and I recently picked up Obduction and it had one, So probably fairer to say a Cyan type puzzle as they appear to love creating wierd numeric representations.