Background
A few years ago, I learned about Cistercian numerals, a fascinating numbering system used by the Cistercian monks in the thirteenth century. The neat thing about them is they can represent any value from 0 to 9,999 with a single numeral. The system is very intuitive, so even though there are so many possible values, it's still fairly simple to pick up.
I played around with them a little--writing out numbers & trying to do basic addition & subtraction. One thing I noticed pretty quickly is that if you want to represent a number larger than 9,999, it gets pretty tricky. In English at least, we scale up numbers by thousands (a thousand thousands is a million; a thousand millions is a billion; and so on). So trying to scale things up by ten thousands gets hard to keep track of fast.
Because of this, I decided to make a similar numbering system that only stores 3 digits per glyph, so each numeral would represent values from 0 to 999, and multiple numerals could be stacked side-by-side for larger numbers, while still being fairly easy to keep track of. Cistercian numerals use the four corners of a staff, so I figured for 3 digits, I could place them on the points of a triangle!
Triangle Runes
- Each rune is built on an equilateral triangle with one point facing upward.
- Each point of the triangle contains a base-ten value, indicated with the following symbols.
- The top point is the Ones Place, the bottom right is the Tens, and the bottom left is the Hundreds.
- Each rune represents a number between 0 and 999. Here are some examples!
- For numbers larger than 999, add additional runes and read them left-to-right.
Notes
- I'm pretty happy with the system I made up for the individual digits. One line for 1. Rotate it for 2. 1 and 2 makes 3. Two 2's makes 4. A circle for 5, and then everything else is just that circle added to the other 4 symbols.
- Because the digits are addition based, actual addition & subtraction are fairly easy with the triangle numerals as well--often you can add or subtract digits visually, without having to think about the numbers much at all.
- While this concept is neat & I think the runes come out looking very cool, it's worth noting that there's not really an advantage to this system over Arabic numerals. Technically you could do Triangle Runes by just writing Arabic numerals on each point of the triangle, but at that point why not just write 3 numerals like we do already? However, the point here is not efficiency. It's novelty & style, and I think triangle runes do a good job of that. If you want to write legible numbers in a way that looks fancy & interesting, Triangle Runes are for you!
- Speaking of which, I'm currently tossing around ideas for a modification for stringing together multiple runes in a more stylistic way. If, for instance, you were to draw an arc on the inside of the Ones Point, and a straight line on the inside of the Hundred's point, then you could rotate your runes any direction you want & they'll still be legible. Combine that with a way of stringing the runes together (hollow circle in the center of the first rune; solid dot in the center of each rune after that; draw lines/arcs connecting the centers), then you could lay out your numbers any way you wanted!