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7mo ago

A cool guide on Tally Marks From Around The World

65 comments

The European tally line diagonal from top left to bottom right feels wrong.
I usually see it the other way.
- Yep, the example in OP seems wrong (for right handed people), it's very awkward line to pull
  
  Not in my experience. Diagonal down is easy to pull
- This is the way
- I've always felt the same about the "no" sign:
  
  Looks to me as if all the ghosts have been busted.

Is this loss?
- Probably
- 5th panel is lit

Since when is Brazil not part of South America?
- We’re special. 😂 I guess because we are a lot similar to other South American countries, but also very different. For instance, we don’t even speak Spanish.

The Asian one makes no sense.
- I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the final one is the symbol for "five" and it takes 5 strokes to draw. it'd be like drawing a 5 one segment at a time in an eight segment number display as the tally marks.
  
  You are wrong. This is the character for "correct". "Five" is similar. Both have five strokes.
  五 = five
  正 = correct, positive
  
  I still don’t like it. It’s not a logical placement of strokes. No I don’t care that the Kanji ultimately means ‘5’.
  I don’t like it. It’s aesthetically displeasing with no logic.
- It's the character for 'correct', which doesn't really explain much. Best I can figure it's just that it's a common character with five strokes in a satisfying right-down-right-down-right order.
- It's simply a 5 stroke character with orthogonal lines: 正
  The reason why it's separate is just that this is the traditional drawing order to write that character.

Every time this gets posted it gets debunked.
- Oh? I can confirm it's true for North America and China, at least.
  Is it the middle one that gets debunked?
  
  Brazilian here, some of us do use the middle one
  
  Right one is 100% used in Japan. Particularly at bars and such for keeping track of how many of that drink the person/table has ordered.
  
  French here we use both the middle and the left. It depends on the group of friends.
- Debunked how? The middle one is the only one I haven't encountered in the wild.
  
  I do a modified version of the middle one, common for people like naturalists apparently, which does four dots to form the vertices of a grid, 1-4, four lines to successively complete a square, 5-8, two lines forming an x in the middle of the square, 9-10.

Thought this was Loss for a second
- I downvoted instinctively.

I do the middle one but start with 4 dots, then connect those dots with lines, then do 2 lines crossing in the middle. it gives you 10 in a small space. So in the pictures there it would be 3, 5, 7, 8, 9.
- That sounds really efficient.

I just feel like the figure on the right should have each unit be the same length. Why should four be denoted with a shorter length?
- 3 is also shorter.
  
  True. I was going to give benefit of the doubt and assume that the creator was counting half of one of the segments, of which it overlaps, as part of that unit. Someone mentioned that the diagram is not actually the correct representation of the number five, anyway. Someone in this comment section said that it means, “correct”. They stated that an entirely different figure (not displayed in this post) actually represents 5.

In france I lften see both the middle and left ones.

65 comments