Pitman Numerals

Dozenal needs and has two more digits than the ten of decimal.

The Pitman character for ten is a turned digit two, ↊. The number of its Unicode code point or slot is 218A, where the letters A or B in a number suggest that this is a number written in the base four squared. It is derived from the initial letter t of the English word ten, but looks a little more like a Greek lower case letter tau, τ Unicode 03C4, in some styles or an insular half uncial style of the letter t, Ꞇ, that has Unicode number U+A786. It is called insular because it was used in the isles, that is, the British Isles.

The Pitman character for eleven is a turned three, ↋. Note that it is not a reflected three as some have claimed. Its Unicode value is 218B. It is derived from the initial letter e of the English word eleven. It looks similar to the lower case Greek letter epsilon, ε Unicode 03B5, and some other characters derived from that and standing for mathematical or physical constants.

Not all fonts have these characters. If they appear as blanks or empty rectangles, then your fonts don't. Fonts that do include recent versions of Times New Roman and Tahoma. If you get and install a recent version of one of these fonts, the Pitman numeral characters should display correctly for you. If you use Microsoft Word, you can type the Unicode number and then press AltX to convert to the character symbol.

If you find other fonts containing the Pitman glyphs, you can announce them here.

On this Base Dozen Forum, you can type the Pitman glyphs for the numerals ten and eleven and see them even if you do not have fonts supporting these characters by using the following BBcode:

Code:

[flipH][flipV]32[/flipV][/flipH]

The result: 32  . This works because combination of the perpendicular reflections produces a half turn rotation. Unfortunately, as you may see there is a problem with added spacing. These four permutations of the code work:

Code:

.[flipH][flipV]32[/flipV][/flipH].
.[flipH][flipV]32[/flipH][/flipV].
.[flipV][flipH]32[/flipH][/flipV].
.[flipV][flipH]32[/flipV][/flipH].

The last two do not add spacing before the Pitman glyphs.

The vertical flip can be used on the reversed ezh Unicode 01B8 to give a Dwiggins variant for the numeral eleven:

Code:

[flipV]Ƹ[/flipV]

The result: Ƹ . This is a bit tall, so you can decrease the font size:

Code:

[flipV][size=9]Ƹ[/size][/flipV]

producing Ƹ .

The total effect: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 92  Ƹ .

To make the pitman numbers more accessable, one might consider creating smilies for them. In essence, one types a simlie, like ;X or ;E and the pitman characters appear.

But I consider the pitman characters to be a printer's hack, in the same line as ə, where one takes a character and set it upside-down in the line of print. But it's better than nothing, I suppose. Having designed my own runes for these, I use V and E for foursix and fivesix resp.

wendy.krieger, Mon 12 Aug 2019 - 5:11 wrote:To make the pitman numbers more accessable, one might consider creating smilies for them.  In essence, one types a simlie, like ;X or ;E and the pitman characters appear.

It was thought better to deactivate smilies for a number of reasons.
1. Blinking smilies were distracting when composing posts. Their selection panel takes up space on the screen.
2. The yellow faces and other colours do not match the steely calm colour scheme of the forum.
3. There is propensity for abuse of smilies, for example where they follow after text of snarkiness or questionable sincerity as though they were supposed to make it better and acceptable.
4. The tone of smilies is unsuitable to the frame of mind progressive for a forum of rational thought.
5. Sometimes text typed can be inadvertently converted to a smilie, typically where punctuation and brackets are combined in ways that can be expected to happen on a forum involving maths notation.
6. It is still possible to type emoticons and kaomoji.