CIↃ in print

Andreas Stötzner
Andreas Stötzner Posts: 838
in Type History
I try to chase specimen of this version of printing the number [Roman] M = 1000, which one finds sometimes on title pages. A quick search only got me two samples from coins (but the principle is the same).

image source: numista.com



Comments

  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 838
    yes thanks, this is what I meant.
  • Helmut Wollmersdorfer
    Helmut Wollmersdorfer Posts: 213
    It's the letter c turned 180°. BTW (I guess you know) the old Roman numerals have code points in Unicode.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerals_in_Unicode#Roman_numerals 

    What I also have seen in old printed books: IIII as number 4, or in blackletter typeface iiij with j as end form. 
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,235
    Of course, though, IIII instead of IV for four was used fairly often in one other specific place: clock faces. Supposedly it's due to a superstition concerning the name of Jupiter.
  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 838
    Helmut Wollmersdorfer said:
    It's the letter c turned 180°. BTW (I guess you know) the old Roman numerals have code points in Unicode.
    In letterpress printing that C is rotated, of course, because you can’t mirror a lead letter. Therefore I wonder why U+2183(-84) is flipped, not rotated. Depending on the typeface, the visual difference may be hard to notice, but it seems odd to me nonetheless.


  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 838
    It seems we have a Unicode-typical mix-up of different things here:

    U+2183 is defined as “roman numeral one hundred” and “Claudian antisigma” which appears as a clear error to me. The two are not the same. The proper solution would have been 
    • to add the annotation “= roman numeral rotated one hundred” to U+0186
    • to name U+2183 “LATIN CAPITAL LETTER CLAUDIAN ANTISIGMA” and
    • group U+2183 together with U+2184 as a normal case pair; and
    • maybe put the Claudian letter pair not in the “Number forms” block but elsewhere.
    b.tw., the term “Lowercase Claudian letter” is a bad joke, considered the historic presence of lowercase letters in emperor Claudius’ times.

    I’d like to learn Peter Constables opinion on how this mess could get fixed.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,719
    edited June 28
    Based on the samples seen so far in this discussion, it isn’t at all clear to me that this is normatively a rotated form as opposed to a flipped form. Yes, in some typographic examples, the C sort has been rotated, but that is not the case in the second of the coins you showed, Andreas, where the form is more obviously flipped.

    Given that there isn’t a clear distinction in use between flipped and rotated forms, I think the Unicode unification of this form with the Claudian antisigma is probably fine. I would want to see a lot more non-typographic examples, before concluding that those are separate characters.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,235
    John Hudson said:
    Given that there isn’t a clear distinction in use between flipped and rotated forms, I think the Unicode unification of this form with the Claudian antisigma is probably fine. I would want to see a lot more non-typographic examples, before concluding that those are separate characters.
    To me, using the glyph for the "open o" would be more appropriate, but just because two characters look the same is no reason for a Unicode unification. That requires the characters to have the same function, so that they wouldn't look different in any typeface.

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