Does anyone know how Roman numerals were pronounced?

Factual Questions
81

Numberphile recently did an episode about people first encountering the Arabic system and a document that maps Roman to Arabic systems.

They mention that people at the time were astonished that there were traders about to do arithmetic in their minds; it was like a superpower.

So it is indeed not the case that the Roman system was adequate for this use, only that they didn’t have an alternative.

82

No sweat:

Unway
Ootay
Eethray
Orfay
Ivefay

83

That’s how the numbers were pronounced in Latin.

84

I think it’s within the realm of possibility that Romans did say things like once in a while, if only to try to sound clever.

85

So do we know how the Romans pronounced the names of the letters? If a Roman asked a friend how to write the number fifty-four, how would the friend reply?

86

Does the question really come down to “Did the Romans have names for the letters of the alphabet they used? And, if so, did they have different names for those letters when they were used as numerals?”

According to the Wikepedia article on the Latin alphabet, the Romans did have names for their letters. I was “i”, pronounced like the vowel sound in “sweet”; V was “u”, pronounced like the vowel sound in “shoot”; X was “ix”, pronounced “iks”; L was “el”, pronounced pretty much as you would expect; M was “em”, pronounced likewise; C was “ce”, pronounced with a hard ‘c’ and the vowel sound from “dress”; D was “de”, also with the vowel sound from “dress”.

There must be a degree of conjecture about the pronunciations; there must have been some degree of variation both over time and in different places.

Wikipedia doesn’t discuss whether the letter were given different names when used as numerals, but there seems no obvious reason why this would have been done.

87

I kinda thought that was what the OP was asking?

88

Roman numerals were originally not derived from, nor related to, the letters that they eventually became associated with. I would expect that before the numerals became associated with letters, the symbols for the numerals would not have been pronounced like the letter names.

89

Check the link in Post 6