# Has any culture in history ever not invented digits, and just used letters?

We have characters for letters and numbers. We typically view them as a discrete sets. Has any culture ever mangled the two? To some degree it seems almost logical if your letters are already conceptually ordinal,

• I have a pear. becomes I have 1 pear
• I have b pear. becomes I have 2 pears
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• See Alphabetic numeral system:"Alphabetic numeral systems originated with Greek numerals around 600 BC and became largely extinct by the 16th century". Greek and Hebrew alphabetic numerals are still in use for some ordinals, mathematicians use some Hebrew numerals for infinite cardinalities (aleph, beth). Sep 14 at 10:58
• @Conifold to your last point there: there's also $\epsilon$ and $\delta$ to represent infinitesimals in calculus. Sep 14 at 11:24
• Roman numerals I, V, X, L, C, M, D are also letters. Perhaps this is a common way of development: first use letters and only later invent special digits for numbers. Sep 14 at 12:14
• "digits" are symbols. Many symbols have been used in history to name numbers. See Numeral system and Karl Menninger, ]Number Words and Number Symbols: Sep 14 at 12:35