Greek numbers and their relationship with letters

We all use numbers:we consider the flying years, banknotes, the number of flowers in the bouquet of the hero of the day and plates on the festive table. Without them, life is not possible. The ability to count is instilled in us from a kindergarten, or even earlier.

Kids learn to count on sticks, then onsimple examples, then the multiplication table goes. Adults easily convert currencies, measures of length and size, calculating the family budget, investments in a business or hundredths on a personal plot.

By the way, numbers and numbers are interconnected, butdifferent categories. A digit carries a number designation, which, in turn, reflects its quantitative reference (or characteristic) and is a collection of numbers.

History of numbers and numbers

Do you know how the numbers appeared?Behind such icons familiar to us since childhood, lies a whole story, saturated with the spirit of antiquity and the trends of antiquity. If you trace the history of the appearance of numbers, you can see the traditions and culture of many peoples who lived long before us.

Наши давние предки вместо цифр оставляли зарубки in the form of direct notches and squiggles on solid wood, bones and stones to indicate the amount of stored food, primitive weapons, and the like. One notch - one unit, one thousand notches - one thousand units. True, our ancestors knew only a few calculi - "one", "two" and "many."

В своих изысканиях учёные мужи периодически are confused as the history of the emergence of numbers and numbers is extremely confused. It is reliably known that the very first written figures appeared in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. At the same time, cuneiform writing was used in Mesopotamia, and cursive hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt. The Mesopotamians put icons on special clay tablets, and the Egyptians used papyri for this purpose. It was from the Egyptians that the ancient Greeks borrowed the numbers, redoing them in their own way.

Teaching from greece

What were the Greek numbers?In ancient Greece, there were two systems of numbers and numbers - Attic and Ionic. Apparently, this is due to the mental work of mathematicians and philosophers living on the ground of myths and legends and competing with each other in mathematical research.

Аттическая система схожа с десятичной, однако the figure 5 predominates. The Greek figures represented by the Attic calculus represented a repetition of collective signs and were similar to the Mesopotamian ones. The number 1 was designated as a dash, 2 - two dashes, 3 - three dashes, 4 - respectively 4 dashes. The number 5 is designated by the first letter of the Greek word "penta", and 10 - by the first letter of the word "deka".

Перед там как в Греции наступила Александрийская era, the ionic number system appeared - Greek numerals, which represented the tandem of the decimal number system and the Babylonian method. The numbers were a drawing of dashes and letters, but they were quite difficult for ordinary people to use. Such a system was used by the great Archimedes and other famous personalities of that time.

Union of letters and numbers

На данный момент в некоторых случаях используется Ionic numbering - with its help you can write numbers only from 1 to 99.999.999, using the Greek alphabet and knowing which letter carries the numerical value of units, tens and hundreds. By the way, such numbers are easy to read in ordinary words. It was the Greeks who became the pioneers from whom this method of calculus was adopted by the Arabs, Semites and Slavs.

The ancient Greek alphabet consisted of 24 letters, to themadded another 3 letters that have not been used for several thousand years. As a result, 27 letters were received, which were subsequently divided into 3 groups, each of which included 9 letters.

The first group included the numbers from 1 to 9, with the number 1 denoted by the first letter of the alphabet "alpha", 2 - the second letter of the "beta", and so on to the number 9, denoted by the letter "theta".

The second group included Greek numbers from 10 to 90, and the third - from 100 to 900.
Числа от 1000 и больше обозначали следующим way: first wrote the corresponding letter from the first group (single digit), then put a comma and wrote letters from the first and second group. The largest number - 10.000 - was called separately and denoted by the letter "M". After some time, the letter was replaced simply with a dot.

At the moment, the Greek alphabetincludes only twenty letters. Do you need to use, and even more so pronounce Greek numbers? Pronunciation is important. To do this, you need at least a little knowledge of the alphabet. Master this article will help. For convenience, we have made two tables in which not only letters are given, but also Greek numbers, their translation into Russian and transcription (pronunciation).

Familiarity with the Greek alphabet

Counting to twenty in Greek

Word users note

What to recommend to active Microsoft usersOffice who want to try translating Greek numbers into Word? First of all, you need to install the Word itself, and then MS Office Proofing Tools SP1. This is necessary for the full use of MS Office Word.

It is also necessary to configure the Greek layoutkeyboards. How to do it? Move the mouse cursor to the keyboard indicator located in the lower right corner of the monitor and right-click on it. Next, in the menu that appears, select the following items: "Settings" -> "Language" -> "Keyboard Layout" -> "Greek" -> "Greek Polytonic". If you know the standard English layout well enough, then using the Greek will not be difficult.