From: Andrew C. West (andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 26 2003 - 11:40:38 EST
On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 08:04:33 -0800, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
> On 26/11/2003 04:40, Andrew C. West wrote:
> >Is this perhaps because all the other Gothic letters
> >can also be used to represent numbers in exactly the same way that U+10341 and
> >U+1034A are used (these two letter were devised specifically to fill the gap
in
> >the series of numbers represented by the ordinary Gothic letters), ...
> >
>
> Probably not. It doesn't take long to see that NINETY appears where one
> might expect a Q and corresponds to the Greek koppa. Koppa was used as a
> letter in very early Greek, but since then (and even to the present day)
> as a numeral with the same value 90. See
> http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/numerals.html#koppa. It is
> clear from the value and the glyph that the Gothic NINETY is derived
> from the Greek koppa. Similarly, the Gothic NINE HUNDRED is derived from
> the Greek sampi (U+03E1).
No-one's disputing the origins of U+10341 and U+1034A. All I'm saying is that
these two letters are neither needed nor actually used for writing Gothic words,
but were devised (i.e. borrowed from Greek) with the sole purpose of
representing the numbers 90 and 900.
Andrew
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