 |
This Page è |
Alphabets |
Numerals |
Semaphore |
Ship's Flags |
Braille |
| See Also è |
Worls Atlas |
History of Oi |
SI Units |
Courses |
Site Map |
IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME
The Greek alphabet is widely used in science to
represent variables in equations. The alphabet
was developed by scholars around 900 BC. Computer
programming languages
don't accept Greek symbols, so this Handbook
does not use them either. Computers can, of
course, accept
Greek letters from Greek configured keyboards,
using Unicode 4.1, and print Greek text, but I
am not aware of a computer program language that
can accept Greek letters in equations or
remarks.
Morse Code Alphabet ==>
The tables below shows the capital and small letters for several common alphabets that may be found in oil field documents, reports, and well logs, along with their English language names, Roman alphabet equivalent, and the numeric value assigned to each letter for counting purposes (from Wikipedia).
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NUMERICAL SYSTEMS
We
use the Western Arabic number system with our Roman alphabet for writing in
English, French, Spanish, and many other languages, including Albanian,
Hungarian, and other non-Roman languages. Western Arabic numerals can be used in
various counting systems including binary, decimal, duodecimal, and hexadecimal
(base 2, 10, 12, 16 respectively). They obey both additive and positional rules.
The Arabic numerals are very familiar to Western society, but are written
differently in other cultures. Below are a few of them:
The ancient Greeks used alphabetic characters to represent numerals. Each unit (1, 2, …, 9) was assigned a separate letter, each tens (10, 20, …, 90) a separate letter, and each hundreds (100, 200, …, 900) a separate letter. This requires 27 letters, so the 24-letter Greek alphabet was extended by using three obsolete letters: stigma for 6, qoppa for 90, and sampi for 900. To distinguish numerals from letters they are followed by the "keraia", a symbol similar to an acute accent sign. This alphabetic representation of numbers is additive and positional, similar to our use of Western Arabic numerals. For example, 241 is represented as σμα' (200 + 40 + 1).
To represent
numbers from 1,000 to 999,999
the same letters are reused to
serve as thousands, tens of
thousands, and hundreds of
thousands. A "left keraia"
is put in front of thousands to
distinguish them from the
standard use. For example, 2008
is represented as ,βη'
(2000 + 8).
In contrast, the Roman Numeral system is
neither strictly additive nor positional. Leading characters can be subtractive
if they have a lower numerical value than the following character. There is no
character for "zero". The Roman alphabetic characters used are I = 1, V = 5, X =
10, L = 50, C = 100, D = 500, M = 1000. A bar over the symbol indicates
multiplication by 1000. The number 9 is represented by IX (10 minus 1),
illustrating the subtractive method. The year 2012 is MMXII, representing the
additive case. The year 1944 is MCMXLIV, illustrating both additive and
subtractive rules. Arithmetic with these symbols is exceedingly difficult.
It is commaon in oil field usage to use M or m to mean 1000 and MM or mm to mean 1,000,000, although MM really means 2000 as a Roman Numeral. In some industries, M is used to mean 1,000,000, as in $6.3 M (6,300,000 dollars). Newspapers and popular magazines get it wrong all the time.
