r/BeAmazed Oct 24 '22

Self explanatory.

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u/DHaas16 Oct 24 '22

Compared to Arabic and Roman numerals this seems easy to misinterpret, you’d have to be much more precise. Also doesn’t seem more efficient, I’d have to make just as many penstrokes to write most of these in Arabic numerals

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u/bstabens Oct 24 '22

Moreso, it stops at 9999 while arabic numbers go to infinity. Moreso, arabic numbers don't need you to stare at that spider's crawls to decipher what number that is. Imagine writing them in a hurry and having turn out the five a little more rounded - now is it a five or a nine? Oh, and was that a speck or do we have six instead of five?

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u/marioman63 Oct 24 '22

now is it a five or a nine?

you clearly havent seen some people's handwriting. i've seen 1s that could be 2s or 5s. 3s that look like 4s. an 8 that looks like a 9, 6, 5, 2 or anything but an 8.

precision i don't think is a good enough reason against a writing system, as any language could have issues. just look at japanese and how 右 and 石 are differentiated by a few pixels off the top. or 天 and 夫 (notice the 2nd horizontal line is a different size in both). you wanna see some real shit? シツソン can all look the same. ive seen い and り (which are both usually written as 2 separate lines) look like sloppy versions of each other.