Today at Futility Closet comes a report on the Mesembryanthemum:
The South African flower Mesembryanthemum draws its name from the Greek roots for middle, embryo, and flower. It’s believed to be the English word containing the highest “score” in Roman numerals — four Ms.
I have no quarrel with the first sentence but the second struck me as immediately improbable, because there are no other letters in Mesembryanthemum with a Roman numeral value so its total value is only 4000. I was immediately able to think of a couple that equal it – words that should be familiar to virtually anyone – and with a little searching was able to find a word that I knew and could define with a total of 4502 (Correction: 4602 – I should learn to add better). Can you find my word? More importantly, can you beat my word’s score?
Edit to add: The word is ‘IMMunoCoMproMIseD’, for a total of 4602, as one clever reader has discerned. This is just a game, of course, but there is a long tradition of Roman numeral chronograms in Europe, passages in which the sum of the Roman numerals gives a significant date. A multi-volume corpus of thousands of these was published in the 19th century and is practically begging for reanalysis – the inscriptions can be located and dated securely (Hilton 1882, 1885, 1895).
Well, we haven’t had an answer, so I’ll give it to you:
Solution: Plate adapted from Jenkinson 1926: Figure 10.
All of the numeral-phrases except the bottom right read CXLVII (= 147). I’ve highlighted every other character in red to emphasize the distinct characters, making this solution comprehensible if not obvious. The fact that you, my readership (several of whom have training in paleography) couldn’t find the solution even after two clues demonstrates the ongoing importance of paleography as a scholarly profession, and also demonstrates the highly aberrant character of the hand.
This plate is taken from a 1926 article ‘The use of Arabic and Roman numerals in English archives’ by Sir Hilary Jenkinson, the doyen of British archivists (and who, shockingly, lacks a Wikipedia page!), who was also one of the major figures in early-twentieth-century British paleography (Jenkinson 1915, 1926). Jenkinson writes of this plate:
First there is the unimportant but highly curious development in one or two Courts of a special Roman numeration for the membranes of their Rolls, which in its later stages is practically unreadable. Our illustration (fig. 10) shows the number 147 as it was written in the years 1421, 1436, and 1466 and finally the number 47 as it appears in 1583: it does not show the worst that might be selected and is only half the size of the original (Jenkinson 1926: 274).
Although I have been familiar with this plate for over a decade, for the life of me I can’t find a way to read 47 (XLVII) out of the bottom-right phrase. I’m sure that Jenkinson had some grounds (probably contextual) for believing this to be the numeral, but I just can’t get 47 out of it. Weirdly enough, I can find 147 in it, but that may just be a product of its association with the other three phrases. Note that the other three are chronologically close while the fourth is nearly a century later. Anyway, I’m really stumped on this one.
But I actually wish to disagree with Jenkinson on one word: ‘unimportant’. The cursive transformation of cumulative numeral phrases is important in the history of numeration because it is the most common means by which cumulative systems, which rely on the repetition of like symbols whose values are added (e.g. XXX = 30), turn into ciphered systems, which do not do so. The figure below (borrowed from my book) shows how the Egyptian hieroglyphic numerals for 6, 9, and 300 became paleographically reduced over time into hieratic forms that do not show any evidence of their original cumulative structure. The ligaturing of individual signs eventually leads to the reconceptualization of the entire set of signs as a single unit. In fact, this process occurred (slightly differently) with the Brahmi numerals 1 through 3 of ancient India, which eventually became the ciphered figures of the Indian, Arabic, and Western numerals used by virtually everyone today (see this chart, for instance).
Cursive reduction of Egyptian numerals (after Chrisomalis 2010: 47)
The Roman numerals ceased to be used in manuscript-writing throughout early modern Europe, so there was no opportunity for the form of this particular court hand to lead from extreme cursivization to something structurally distinct in the Roman numerals. But it could have happened, just as it happened before several times. And that (along with so many other things) is why paleography matters.
Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2010. Numerical Notation: A Comparative History. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jenkinson, Hilary. 1915. Palaeography and the practical study of court hand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jenkinson, Hilary. 1926. The use of Arabic and Roman numerals in English archives. The Antiquaries Journal 6:263-275.
Arthur Chrisomalis, The Lines
Construction paper. ff. 2. Unfoliated. 11×8.5 in. Bound at left with four staples. Dated 2010 (?) in hybrid numerical notation (see below).
This manuscript is a juvenile work probably composed on 02/06/2010. There is textual and ethnographic evidence to suggest that the scribe (age 4.5) was aided by a more competent master. Currently the MS is magnetically affixed to the archivum refrigeratum in the scribe’s home.
fol. 1r: Text in orange ink, 3 lines. (Plate 1)
1v: Vertical lines in pencil, crossed with horizontal and diagonal lines in green, pink, red, grey, black, purple, and orange ink. Apparently nonrepresentational.
2r: Vertical lines in pencil, crossed with horizontal and vertical lines in red ink. Apparently nonrepresentational.
2v: Stylized depiction of a smiling human figure in orange ink. Elongated fingers and toes, highly enlarged ears. May be a scribal self-portrait.
Text (fol. 1r)
1. THE LINES
2. ArTHu
3. ||0|0 r
Plate 1: APTC 1, fol. 1r.
Notes
l. 1: Written in a bold majuscule hand in orange ink. Dotted pencil marks underlying the ink suggest that this line was prepared by the scribe with the aid of a master, an observation later confirmed ethnographically.
l. 2: Written in a hybrid minuscule/majuscule hand; H dips well below the line. Absence of pencil marks and unusual features of the hand suggest that it was composed unaided (confirmed ethnographically).
l. 3: The final character ‘r’ at the right margin seems to be properly attached to the end of l. 2; it is spaced significantly apart from the unusual characters at left. The reading ‘11010’ as an Arabic numeral is improbable given limitations on scribe’s counting abilities. Ethnographic interview with scribe’s assistant/instructor/mother confirms that this is a hybrid notation for the date of composition, 2010. Upon learning of the custom of dating the frontispieces of books from his mother, the author inquired how to do so, and was told, “Put 2-0-1-0”, at which point he wrote the characters ||, then paused and examined the characters. At this point his mother informed him that he could just write the number 2, to which he replied, “That is a 2, in lines.” Thereupon he continued to write the final three characters, noting, however, that the last 0 “is more of an oval.”
One is reminded of the unusual notation developed by Ocreatus in his 1130 Helcep Sarracenicum ‘Saracen Calculation’ which combines the ordinary Roman numerals I, II, III … IX with a circle for O, thus producing a mixed system of the additive Roman numerals and positional Western numerals (Burnett 2006; Chrisomalis 2010: 120). Thus, Ocreatus wrote 1089 as I.O.VIII.IX. Attested in only one MS (Cashel, G.P.A. Bolton Library, Medieval MS 1), this notation represents an effort to incorporate positionality into existing systems of notation, and is related to the debate between the abacists and algorithmists over the proper contexts of use for the newer Western numerals.
Despite the temptation to see in this line a re-invention or re-discovery of Ocreatus’ notation, the ethnographic evidence suggests that this is unlikely. Although the author is familiar with Roman numerals in the context of clocks, the description of the characters || as ‘lines’ rather than ‘numbers’ or ‘Roman numerals’ suggests instead an effort to incorporate tallying principles. It is probable that the Roman numerals derive ultimately from an as-yet unattested Italic practice of tallying used in the 6th century BCE or earlier (Keyser 1988; Chrisomalis 2010: 95-6). Yet tallying is distinct from cumulative-additive numeration like the Roman numerals in that it is produced sequentially as an open-ended count; one cannot simply add signs to the Roman XIII – the equivalent tally might be IIIIVIIIIXIII (Chrisomalis 2010: 15). It is therefore probable that this notation represents the scribe’s attempt to combine the elementary tallying principle of one-to-one correspondence with the familiar Western numerals.
The ethnographic evidence that the scribe paused (as if bemused) upon the production of || might suggest that this form is a scribal error; given, however, that he is conversant with the Western numerals and is capable of producing them unaided, the hypothesis cannot be discounted that the use of || for 2 represents an aesthetically motivated decision. While the title of the work, ‘The Lines’, may refer to the vertical and horizontal lines in fol. 1v and 2r, it may equally be a reference to the lines in the date in fol. 1r.
Works cited
Burnett, Charles. 2006. The semantics of Indian numerals in Arabic, Greek and Latin. Journal of Indian Philosophy 34:15-30.
Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2010. Numerical Notation: A Comparative History. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Keyser, Paul. 1988. The origin of the Latin numerals 1 to 1000. American Journal of Archaeology 92:529-546.
The World Loanword Database project (WOLD), edited by Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor, is now online and freely available to users. It’s a remarkable resource compiled with the purpose of analyzing language contact at the lexical level. Over fifty linguists (including my colleague Martha Ratliff here at Wayne State) have provided mini-vocabularies of languages (41 in total) including information for thousands of words on borrowing, attested age, and analyzability, creating cross-linguistic indices that measure the degree to which particular words (and types of words) tend to be borrowed, and from which languages they are borrowed. So, for instance, you can find that more languages have a borrowed word for father than for mother, or that Hawai’ian borrowed several terms for continental North American animals (prairie dog, skunk, kingfisher) from Ute (an indigenous language of Colorado). It’s a rich and highly functional database, and my only ‘complaint’ is that I’d like to see hundreds more languages covered! I need to stop playing with it right now or my day is going to be shot.
Of course, being who I am and doing what I do, the first place I turned was to the numerals, and I immediately noticed two significant things:
– Ordinal numerals seem to be less frequently borrowed than cardinals; first is borrowed less often than one; second less often than two; and third less often than three.
– Fifteen is borrowed less often than five or ten. Fifteen is far more analyzable than either ten or five (most often as ’10+5′) – so how does this make sense?) I’ll have to look at the data more closely to figure this one out … but not today, work calls!
The excellent people at Cambridge have provided me with a downloadable flyer for Numerical Notation: A Comparative History which can be redeemed online, by phone or by mail for a 20% discount off the list price ($76 US instead of $95). This offer is good until the end of May.
Glossographia 
