[HN Gopher] On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV
___________________________________________________________________
On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV
Author : malingo
Score : 337 points
Date : 2024-03-14 04:40 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (museum.seiko.co.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (museum.seiko.co.jp)
| periram wrote:
| Instead of having an exception to the rule, make the exception
| the rule -> It would have been great if IX was XIIII too.
| ijxjdffnkkpp wrote:
| I know you must mean VIIII
| periram wrote:
| VIIII indeed.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| This has always been one of my go-to fun facts.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| The third image they show uses IV.
| al_borland wrote:
| As much as the IIII has bothered me over the years, actually
| seeing IV on a clock face makes me think IIII is the right
| choice.
|
| That said, I always go with Arabic numerals, so it's a moot
| point for me, practically speaking.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I've seen many clocks with either.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| But its not
|
| Doc Brown can't be wrong:
|
| https://clickamericana.com/wp-content/uploads/Back-to-the-Fu...
| somat wrote:
| Nicely symmetrical around the 5 and the 10. Which makes me want
| to produce this cursed set of roman numerals.
|
| IIIIV IIIV IIV IV V VI VII VIII VIIII
| hex4def6 wrote:
| This seems like a much better fleshed out exploration of this
| subject: https://monochrome-watches.com/why-do-clocks-and-
| watches-use...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > ...the Roman numeral system changed to the more familiar
| subtractive notation. However, this was well after the fall of
| the Roman Empire.
|
| This contradicts examples that Wikipedia has of subtractive
| notation during the height of the Roman Empire (though it's not
| clear to me when "IV" became the accepted standard form).
| btmiller wrote:
| I like the literacy explanation. If reading letters was hard
| enough for enough people, why add extra complexity by
| introducing a subtractive system? But as the populous becomes
| more educated and there's less concern about reading ability,
| it makes sense that the next domino to fall is "boy those 4 i's
| in a row sure are hard to distinguish". Complexity gets
| progressively introduced -- that to me sounds like lots of tech
| adoption curves.
| nvader wrote:
| The reason that I heard was that it was easy to mass-engrave a
| single plate:
|
| VIIIIX
|
| For each clock, you make 4 of these, and split each block into
| numbers the following way:
|
| V IIII I X
|
| VI III IX (mirror the IX for 11)
|
| VII II IX
|
| VIII IIX
|
| This lets you mass produce watch numbers with a minimum of wasted
| material.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| I think most clocks and watches would have the numerals
| engraved directly into the face, and if they were separate
| pieces as on a tower clock they would be either be engraved by
| hand or with a pantograph, but probably not engraved at all but
| cut out from a sheet. In any case I don't see how your method
| creates any meaningful economies of scale -- if anything four
| 'I's requires _more_ material than an 'IV.'
| qprofyeh wrote:
| Brilliant if true!
| JoBrad wrote:
| Doesn't that also work for IVIIIX?
| madcaptenor wrote:
| That's six letters. The full set I through XII uses 26
| letters (if you use IV) or 28 (if IIII), so there will be
| some wastage.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Nit: Does the plate need a fifth I?
|
| Also 12 needs to be mirrored I think.
|
| Otherwise lgtm.
| ghaff wrote:
| I wonder how much Roman numerals are even taught any longer.
| Maybe 5 years ago now I was traveling with a friend who went to a
| solid US suburban high school outside of a major city. Younger
| than me but certainly not young. And she asked me what a date
| written in Roman numerals was in the numbering system we normally
| use. I was somewhat floored.
|
| Thinking about it though. It sort of is cultural/historical
| trivia. How many hours do you spend in school drilling how Roman
| numerals are constructed rather than teaching something else. I
| suppose it's nice enough for those who encounter them when
| traveling. But pretty far on the not-essential end of the axis.
| djur wrote:
| I was taught about Roman numerals in school (mid-90s) but it
| was a brief thing, maybe a few homework assignments in a larger
| unit about Roman history. Certainly not hours of drilling. I
| can read a clock fine, and I can read a date if I spend some
| time thinking it through. But it's not really a life skill.
| ghaff wrote:
| Not remembering the details, but learning it in the 70s or
| so, I can look at a Roman date and not immediately grasp the
| year in terms I'm more familiar with but I can decode it in
| 10 seconds or so. I assume there was a fair bit of drilling
| if I remember after all this time. But then I had a couple
| years of Latin too.
| reaperman wrote:
| I'd say it's good to be exposed to for a short few lessons at a
| young age. My friends and I found endless fascination with them
| and enjoyed inventing our own numbering systems. It helped a
| lot when I had to think in other bases like binary or
| hexadecimal, because my perspective had been broadened by roman
| numerals.
|
| But I'd say maybe not waste too much time on it. Kids will play
| with whatever they play with, you can lead them to water but
| cannot make them drink. We just happened to enjoy playing with
| number systems, and it helped a lot that our school introduced
| us to several for us to play with initially.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I taught my son a senary method for similar reasons, and also
| because hexagons are the bestagons. 12s are quite useful not
| only for time telling (since they give a nice number of ways
| to divide an hour) but also for evenly splitting the musical
| octave, and for counting with flesh between knuckles on one
| hand.
|
| We do base twelve in our household. It's easier to hold in my
| head than base thirty-six.
|
| Edit: I was halfway joking but I'm noticing that the 12-hour
| clock is very elegantly conveyed using base-36 hand gestures.
| The "hands" of the clock bring in this case literal human
| hands.
|
| [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senary#Finger_counting
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| It is certainly good to learn, that there _are_ different
| number systems. Such knowledge can only serve to potentially
| at some point spark ideas. I see roman numbers as related to
| a unary system for example. In computer stuff we learn about
| binary, octal, and hexadecimal representation too (even if
| they are something else to decimal system than roman numbers
| are to it). It will not hurt mathematical ability and thought
| to know such things.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I was "taught" them in history class I think but I can hardly
| make sense of anything beyond 100
| Symbiote wrote:
| In Britain the end credits for BBC programmes would finish
| with the final line: (c) BBC MCMXCVI
|
| I can generally figure them out before the line has hit the
| top of the screen. Of course, it was much easier a few years
| later: (c) BBC MM
|
| or now (c) BBC MMXXIV
| vram22 wrote:
| 1996, 2000 and 2024.
| crq-yml wrote:
| Hollywood used to use a Roman copyright year as well. The
| rumor I heard was that it was intended to obfuscate the
| time of production so that audiences would think they are
| seeing new work.
| roygbiv2 wrote:
| This is the only reason I still know Roman numerals. Still
| do try and work out what they are if I get that far into
| the credits.
| JdeBP wrote:
| Having been amused by the headlined tiny factlet about
| clock faces when I was a child, I observe that the pseudish
| BBC copyright declaration system is, apart from the odd
| regnal number in law citations and apart from 19th century
| hymnals, pretty much my _only_ significant exposure to
| Roman numerals through my entire life.
|
| The last time I even _saw_ a clock face with Roman
| numerals, it was when clearing the house of a person who
| had died.
|
| _The HHGTTG_ in the 1980s was sarcastic about digital
| watches being thought a pretty neat idea by humans, but
| they have definitely caught on. I have three clocks within
| view right now as I type this, one on an answer 'phone,
| and they are all digital readouts. None of them has an
| analogue option.
|
| Fun fact: The pseudish BBC copyright declaration system did
| not begin until the middle 1970s. Before then, copyright
| years were in Indian numerals. In contrast to all of the
| earlier discussion on this page about the age and length of
| the Roman Empire, this particular practice post-dates the
| U.K.'s accession into the EEC and the U.K.'s conversion to
| decimal coinage.
|
| Another fun fact: It isn't solely the BBC, in fairness. ITV
| companies did this back then, too. Granada's _Crown Court_
| has Roman numerals in the copyright year in its end
| credits, for just one example. GRANADA
| Colour Production (c) Granada UK MCMLXXVIII
| swores wrote:
| > _I have three clocks within view right now as I type
| this, one on an answer 'phone, and they are all digital
| readouts. None of them has an analogue option._
|
| It is at least simple to have an analogue clock face on
| iPhones, albeit with a digital one too - can't resist
| sharing screenshot considering what my next calendar
| appointment happens to be...
| https://i.ibb.co/0JgJL0p/IMG-3479.jpg (no it doesn't take
| 15 minutes, but is needed once a week - it's a very old
| clock.)
| stevekemp wrote:
| I collect watches, and I have examples of various types
| (diver, pilot, etc, etc). The only thing I don't have is
| any watch with Roman Numerals, I don't like the way they
| look.
|
| That said I have a bunch of analog clocks around my flat,
| and zero digital ones. It's actually been kinda fun
| watching our child learn to tell the time:
|
| With an analog clock he pretty quickly understood the
| idea that one rotation of the seconds-hand meant a minute
| moved, and when the minute hand went all the way round
| the clock it was another hour.
|
| But digital time? He didn't understand how something went
| from 19:59 to 20:00, for example. So he'd always say
| "Daddy what the clock is?"
|
| (Finnish is is native tongue, he speaks to me in English,
| but some of the phrasing is obviously "I translated this
| in my head".)
| gerikson wrote:
| I sometimes use a digital wristwatch just to mix things
| up and I have a tough time sometimes translating how long
| to wait for pasta to cook - on an analog face, 11 minutes
| is easy to represent visually, but with a digital I have
| to do math in my head.
| stevekemp wrote:
| I have one digital watch, the Casio F-91W, along with a
| mechanical "jump hand" watch, which shows the time using
| a pair of rotating wheels which have digits written on
| them. Kinda cute, but also a little hard to read in low-
| light.
|
| I admit I've used the rotating bezel of a diving-watch to
| time cooking more often than for timing dives. They're
| very practical for that!
| bityard wrote:
| I don't think they are taught widely, but that's because their
| use is fairly niche and they are easy to learn in any case.
| There are lots of fields where you not get by easily without
| knowing them or at least figuring them out for yourself.
| Historians and lawyers come to mind, for example.
| eru wrote:
| Well, not everything needs to be taught in school.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| The most important use for teaching Roman numerals that I see
| is learning that bad abstractions (here: a number system) can
| be made to work, but they still suck. The solution is to find
| better abstractions. Maybe it inspires curiosity in how (well)
| modern maths works.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > bad abstractions (here: a number system) can be made to
| work, but they still suck
|
| The only _really_ bad thing about Roman numerals is non-
| positionality, and it kinda follows naturally from them being
| merely transcriptions of the states of the 5+2-beads abacus
| that was popular back then. If only the norm back then were
| the 10-beads abacus... alas, the history is what it is.
| never_inline wrote:
| India. was taught roman numerals upto 1000 in elementary school
| math, 5th grade or so. Quickly forgot.
| ummonk wrote:
| Indian numbers seem almost as messy as Roman numerals though.
|
| Verbally, the system seems to go thousand -> lakh -> crore ->
| thousand crore -> lakh crore, but then stop there, rarely
| extending to crore crore or inducting any farther.
|
| Meanwhile commas don't seem to follow the verbal convention -
| instead showing up every two digits even after a crore, so a
| thousand crore looks more like ten hundred crore, and a lakh
| crore looks more like ten hundred hundred crore.
| intelkishan wrote:
| Crore is followed by 'Arab', not a thousand crore. The
| system also goes beyond 'Arab' but you won't normally
| encounter the higher terms.
| never_inline wrote:
| > Verbally, the system seems to go thousand -> lakh ->
| crore -> thousand crore -> lakh crore
|
| Most people don't deal in these numbers, beyond the crores.
| And in sciences, exponential notation is norm anyway.
|
| There's no way it is as messy as Roman numerals.
| t-3 wrote:
| I don't know about now, but ~25 years ago when I was in
| kindergarten one the things they focused on teaching was
| telling time and reading clocks, which came with reading Roman
| numerals.
| ghaff wrote:
| Reading analog clocks was a pretty basic life skill, even for
| a young kid back then. To which, as you say, Roman numerals
| were often at least an adjunct. (Having said that I have no
| idea when I learned Roman numerals.)
| kypro wrote:
| My GF works in schools here in the UK. According to her a lot
| of kids can't read analogue clocks any more because they all
| check the time on their phones.
|
| In her opinion it's probably partly related to Covid too
| because although they do still teach it in school (at least
| here in the UK), there's a cohort of kids who missed a lot of
| basic stuff like this during lockdowns. So I think here in the
| UK kids around the age of 11-12 really struggle with this
| specifically because roman numerals and analogue clocks is
| something they typically would learn around the age of 7-8.
| pharrington wrote:
| The USA will stop teaching Roman numerals when we stop
| celebrating the yearly Super Bowl. No time soon.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I collect roman coins, and they also used IIII themselves on at
| least a couple of types I can think of, and also VIIII instead of
| IX.
| hnbad wrote:
| This shouldn't be surprising given that even orthography and
| names were often not standardized consistently for most of
| history.
|
| For example, Adolf Hitler's grandfather was called _Hiedler_ ,
| not _Hitler_ and the spelling change was the result of his
| father 's name, Alois Hitler, being changed later in his life
| after first being recorded as _Aloys Schicklgruber_ (the family
| name being that of his mother rather than father as the
| fatherhood was apparently initially contested).
|
| Or for orthography you just need to look at any historical text
| pre-19th century or so and you'll find plenty of oddities that
| often change regionally or even between writers in the same
| region.
|
| Now expand this to the time scale and area of the Roman
| Empire/Republic and it's amazing most of it was somehow
| coherent over time. Actually as far as I recall, the
| "subtractive" style was only used consistently in the Middle
| Ages. Another odd variant I've seen is "IIX" instead of "VIII".
| And let's not talk about how larger numbers were represented or
| shenanigans like the "long I" instead of "II".
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| That was a quick escalation to Hitler - just goes to prove
| Godwin's law! :)
|
| I didn't realize the subtractive style really dates to the
| middle ages, but that certainly seems consistent with the
| coins - I checked a bunch more and none seem to use it.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's unclear to me when the (now standard) subtractive form
| became the standard; there are examples in Roman times of e.g.
| IIX for 8, and VIIII for 9, both of which would be non-standard
| today.
| ghaff wrote:
| Like spelling, a lot of things used to be far less
| standardized.
| JdeBP wrote:
| Or, rather, our idea of what the standard was, skewed as it
| is by survivorship bias and coming centuries after the fact,
| is superficial and wrong.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| It's more the case that the world is big and communication
| used to be slow. So regional variations would develop.
| Sometimes becoming their own language, given enough time.
|
| It's easy to forget how hard it is to standardise a large
| populous given everything these days can be shared at near-
| to-light-speed but even today you have regional slang.
| Terms that might be common in the north of a country but
| alien to southerners.
|
| So I find it entirely believable that there were multiple
| "standards" for Roman numerals that spanned different
| regions and periods of time.
| ghaff wrote:
| >So I find it entirely believable that there were
| multiple "standards" for Roman numerals that spanned
| different regions and periods of time.
|
| That indeed seems to be the case. Apparently it largely
| standardized at some point in the Middle Ages as usage
| was decreasing. Although I can't find a reference, it's
| logical to assume given the timeframe and place that the
| Church probably had something to do with the
| standardization whether formally or otherwise.
| simondotau wrote:
| Non-standard, but parses unambiguously.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> The numerical notation of 4 is IV in Roman numerals._
|
| Using "IIII" instead of "IV" isn't even necessarily wrong. Rome
| was a big empire with a widely-distributed populace that lasted
| for a thousand years. The usage of numerals changed over time and
| according to context:
|
| _" While subtractive notation for 4, 40 and 400 (IV, XL and CD)
| has been the usual form since Roman times, additive notation to
| represent these numbers (IIII, XXXX and CCCC)[9] continued to be
| used, including in compound numbers like 24 (XXIIII),[10] 74
| (LXXIIII),[11] and 490 (CCCCLXXXX).[12] The additive forms for 9,
| 90, and 900 (VIIII,[9] LXXXX,[13] and DCCCC[14]) have also been
| used, although less often. The two conventions could be mixed in
| the same document or inscription, even in the same numeral. For
| example, on the numbered gates to the Colosseum, IIII is
| systematically used instead of IV, but subtractive notation is
| used for XL; consequently, gate 44 is labelled XLIIII."_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Origin
|
| As for clock faces, the explanation that I always heard was that
| it simplified the manufacturing process to use IIII rather than
| IV; something about making better use of materials to have one
| fewer V and one more I.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I can't see any logic in the manufacturing theory. V is already
| on the clock many times so they're making them, and IIII is
| more material and parts.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I guess it depends on how hard it is to make a V vs. an I.
| For all we know, V's are more expensive.
| fsckboy wrote:
| the point is that you can have a single die that cuts
| XVIIIII, and use it iv times and get what you need for I II
| III IIII V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII
|
| this is not for modern manufacturing of millions, it's for
| one at a time clockmaking in a little shop, for which it's a
| pretty efficient way to accomplish the task and doesn't
| require keeping an inventory
| tadfisher wrote:
| Wouldn't that also work with IXIVIII on the die? How do you
| print IX with yours?
|
| An improvement would be IXIVIII actually, then all
| combinations can be located in that string.
| nwiswell wrote:
| > How do you print IX with yours?
|
| You rotate XI 180 degrees.
| maratc wrote:
| In most serif typefaces, one of the glyphs is
| significantly thicker than the other, and they don't meet
| exactly at 50% height. If one rotates the letter X 180
| degrees, it would look out of place.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Capit
| ali...
| TylerE wrote:
| No, because you need a 5th V for IV. Adding a V is more
| overhead than adding a I, and will give you 3 V's you
| have no use for.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Oh that's clever!
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > you can have a single die that cuts XVIIIII, and use it
| iv times
|
| To be a bit more explicit, you use the the die four (4)
| times, and get 4 Xs, 4 Vs, and 4*IIIII = 20 Is, which is
| exactly right for I II III IIII V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII.
| Using IV would mean a 5 Vs, but only 4 Xs, and 17 Is, so
| you couldn't cut a full set with a single die without using
| a much larger die (= more work making and using the die) or
| having extra pieces (= wasted material) left over.
| swman wrote:
| Dang that just hit me. They were around for 1 THOUSAND years.
| I'm an Indian-American, and the country I was born in has only
| been around since 1947 and America since 1776.
|
| In terms of "empires" that were founded, its crazy how young
| our modern societies are compared to Rome.
| aragilar wrote:
| 2 thousand if you also include the eastern empire.
| morcus wrote:
| If you consider the so-called Byzantines to be Romans (and
| you should, for lots of reasons), the Roman state was at
| least a notable regional power all the way from the mid 300s
| BCE all the way up to 1204 - that's around 1500 years. And it
| existed for a few hundred years more on either end.
|
| Truly boggles the mind.
| cncovyvysi wrote:
| Found the gold player with conq knowledge
| schoen wrote:
| I remember someone (maybe Tamim Ansary?) writing that
| states that claimed to be the direct successor of the Roman
| Empire existed until 1922, at least in the sense that the
| Ottoman Empire used some titles and administrative
| terminology of the Byzantine Empire.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sultans_of_the_Ottoma
| n...
|
| > After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed
| II, Ottoman sultans came to regard themselves as the
| successors of the Roman Empire, hence their occasional use
| of the titles caesar (qySr qayser) of Rum, and emperor, as
| well as the caliph of Islam.
|
| A more direct name claim would be
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Rum
|
| which lasted until 1308.
|
| A different later tradition of claiming to be the Roman
| emperor is the Holy Roman Empire's
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire
|
| which used that term after a break of several centuries (so
| not very continuously with the ancient Roman Empire). But
| Germans then claimed to be Roman emperors (in some sense)
| until 1806!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_II,_Holy_Roman_Empero
| r
|
| These aren't as continuous with the ancient Roman empire as
| the Byzantines, but it's still pretty astonishing to think
| that various monarchs were still claiming to be (in at
| least a theoretical legal sense) Roman emperors during the
| 1800s and 1900s.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Yea I think it's a fair argument that the last gasp of
| the Roman Empire ended in world war 1
| xandrius wrote:
| If you forget Italian fascists trying to bring it back,
| otherwise you could push it to the end of WWII
| kibwen wrote:
| Unfortunately, Putin still occasionally invokes Russia as
| the successor to the Eastern Roman Empire in an attempt
| to justify his imperial ambitions, so we're still riding
| this train.
| sorokod wrote:
| There is a Russian name for Istanbul - Tsar'grad
| (Tsargrad). The relevancy of this traditional name in our
| time can be glimpsed from the media org tsargrad.tv , a
| Russian equivalent of fox news.
| vik0 wrote:
| It's not just a Russian name, it's the Slavic name for
| Constantinople. It's used in all Slavic-speaking
| countries when teaching Byzantine history, of course,
| written with slight distortions depending on the Slavic
| language in question
| alfnor wrote:
| This video claims 2011
|
| https://youtu.be/j-KxS3L9bcM
| jbandela1 wrote:
| Also the Czars of Russia. The Romanovs were descending
| from the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor (Sophia
| Palaiologina niece of Constantine XI).
|
| So you are right that WWI can be argued to the real end
| of the Roman Empire!!!
|
| One of these days I am going to a series on "When did the
| Roman Empire End?" Currently, I have at least 10
| plausible dates/events. It turns out to be a very
| interesting overview of a lot of events and characters in
| Western History.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Also the Czars of Russia.
|
| Yep. "Czar" = "Caesar". Likewise "Kaiser" in the Germanic
| regions.
|
| The British monarch was called "Kaisar-i-Hind" by Hindi-
| speaking people, when the subcontinent was controlled by
| the British.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| Incidently, the last Caesar (the Czar of Bulgaria until
| 1946) is still alive:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
| staplung wrote:
| Ha, that's nothin'. The ancient Egyptians used a 365 day
| calendar (with no leap years) so it drifted by .25 days every
| year. So after 730 years it's essentially backwards (summer
| solstice is when winter solstice used to be etc.). After
| that, it starts coming back into alignment again but takes
| another 730 years to get there. They used their calendar for
| so long that it nearly had time to roll over like this twice!
| owlninja wrote:
| Somehow, for the first time ever, I recently heard the idea
| of the 13 month year and I sort of nodded my head in
| interest. Then I heard someone breakdown the history of
| calendars and it really blew my mind. Mainly the amount of
| thought that went into it and the incredible span of time
| it was revised and discussed!
| eternauta3k wrote:
| This is an excellent podcast on the history of
| timekeeping: https://www.hi101.ca/?p=566
| brandensilva wrote:
| The 13 month per calendar year (Mayan calendar) just
| makes so much sense as a web developer but somehow as a
| human it also seems hella mundane to have the same 28 day
| cycle repeated. Maybe that last day of the year party
| would make up for it though.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| The only disadvantage I can see is that you'd have your
| birthday in the same day of the week every year. If you
| are born on a Monday, you'll celebrate on a Monday every
| year in your life.
| eesmith wrote:
| In our current calendar system I don't always celebrate
| my birthday on my birthday.
| szundi wrote:
| This is so true and adds to the prev prev argument
| eesmith wrote:
| I'm so familiar with the Gregorian calendar that I would
| prefer the International Fixed Calendar (13 months of 28
| days + Leap Day and Year Day) with its yearly
| synchronization over the Mayan calendar.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| I quite like the hobbit calendar. 12 months of 30 days
| each, plus 5 (or 6) extra days that don't belong to a
| month and are celebration days. Mid-year day and the leap
| day don't have a day of the week, so each date always is
| the same day of the week.
|
| https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Shire_Calendar
| brandensilva wrote:
| More celebration days, no complaints here. I wish
| humanity cared more about such universal celebrations
| that brought us together.
|
| Of course those days would be very hectic travel wise if
| the entire population of earth were to migrate around on
| those days.
| bombcar wrote:
| Days that aren't part of a month are such a elegant way
| to solve the problem.
|
| Even now 29 Feb shouldn't exist, it should just be "leap
| day" and have no numerical significance.
|
| Screw the computers, they can learn to adapt.
| pier25 wrote:
| Woah. The change happened over multiple generations but
| they must have noticed, no?
| riku_iki wrote:
| its always hot there, so no wonder they didn't notice
| winter shift (joking).
| bombcar wrote:
| This is actually partially part of it - if you're
| tracking your activities based on natural phenomena, you
| don't need to worry about a calendar - just things like
| "days since full moon" or "weeks since the flood".
| Ekaros wrote:
| The farmers did not care. Nile floods at sometime, then
| it goes back then you do all the normal things until you
| harvest. Repeat. So they really did not need calendar for
| that.
|
| And on other hand the clerks had enough time to make
| writing system really hard to learn so such thing would
| make things even better for them...
| nine_k wrote:
| My favorite factoid about ancient Egypt is that Cleopatra,
| the last pharaon queen of Egypt, lived much closer to the
| time when humans landed on Moon than to the time when the
| great pyramids were built.
| rocqua wrote:
| Also, Cleopatra considered herself Greek (or rather
| hellinistic) and had the lineage to prove that. She is
| remembered fondly because she was decently respectful of
| her Egyptian subjects, but that was mostly in contrast to
| her predecessors.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > She is remembered fondly because...
|
| From accounts by professional ancient historians, that
| "fact" may mostly be PR spin and "rule of cool" myth. For
| instance:
|
| https://acoup.blog/2023/05/26/collections-on-the-reign-
| of-cl...
| pyuser583 wrote:
| She's remembered because of her alliance with Mark
| Anthony.
| bell-cot wrote:
| True...but "last pharaon queen of Egypt" may be
| misleading, for those unfamiliar with the history:
|
| Cleopatra was a Macedonian Greek, descended from one of
| Alexander the Great's generals. Alexander had conquered
| Egypt about 3 centuries earlier...taking it from the
| Persians, who had previously conquered the final "native"
| XXX Dynasty...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_Kingdom
|
| And giving Egypt's foreign conqueror the title "Pharaoh",
| if only for domestic consumption, persisted for centuries
| after Cleopatra:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_pharaoh
|
| Though Rome's appointed provincial governors mostly
| didn't care if the locals called them "Pharaoh".
| ithkuil wrote:
| To her credit though she was one of the few Ptolemaic
| rules of Egypt who even bothered learning the Egyptian
| language
| bell-cot wrote:
| Yes- _ish_. Quoting a bit from Dr. Bret Devereaux, whose
| take on Cleopatra VII I linked a bit further down:
|
| > Let's start with languages, because I think this fact
| can be presented in a somewhat distorted way. The
| language of the Ptolemaic court was Greek, initially
| Macedonian Greek (the Macedonians had a pronounced
| accent), though Plutarch notes that some of the later
| Ptolemies had lost their Macedonian accent (Plut. Ant.
| 27.3-4). Cleopatra, by contrast, was the first of the
| Ptolemies to bother to learn Egyptian (which should tell
| you something about the character of Ptolemaic rule;
| imagine if King Charles was the first English king since
| George I and kings from the House of Hanover to bother to
| learn English). The problem with this fact is that it is
| incomplete, presenting Cleopatra as a Greek-speaker who
| learned the language of her people out of sincere
| devotion, but that's not what Plutarch says. Plutarch
| says:
|
| >> She could turn [her voice] easily to whichever
| language she wished and she conversed with few barbarians
| entirely through an interpreter, and she gave her
| decisions herself to most of them, including Ethiopians,
| Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes and
| Parthians. She is said to have learned the languages of
| many others also, although the kings before her did not
| undertake to learn the Egyptian language, even though
| some of them had abandoned the Macedonian dialect.16
|
| > So let's unpack that. This isn't a native speaker of
| Greek who learned just the language of her subjects, but
| a spectacularly skilled linguist who learned a lot of
| different languages, quite regardless of if she ruled the
| people in question. Running through the list, she
| evidently learned Ethiopian, the language of the people
| on her southern border, the speech of the Troglodytae,
| the people who lived on the coast of the Red Sea (a
| hinterland of her kingdom). The 'language of the Hebrews'
| here is probably Aramaic rather than Hebrew (which would
| also cover much of Syria), while the language of the
| Medes and Parthians might mean both Old Persian and the
| Parthian language. To which we must add Egyptian, implied
| by that last sentence; it also seems fairly clear
| Cleopatra knew at least some Latin.17 This is part of why
| I find arguments that use Cleopatra's knowledge of
| Egyptian as strong proof either for her Egyptian ancestry
| or deep attachment to Egypt less than fully compelling;
| she was surely not Parthian and did not have a deep
| attachment to Parthia, but she learned their language
| too. Again, there's not nothing here, but it's not a slam
| dunk either.
|
| SO - literally truth that she learned Egyptian. But
| extremely sketchy to extrapolate from that fact to any
| sort of "she cared more about her subjects" conclusion.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yeah. I didn't want to imply that she particularly cared
| about the language of the people she ruled, as much as I
| wanted to imply that none of her predecessors did
| wolfi1 wrote:
| Troglodytes? cave dwellers?
| dmd wrote:
| Yes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troglodytae
| selcuka wrote:
| Another fun fact is that mammoths weren't extinct yet
| when the pyramids were built.
| leononame wrote:
| Woah that's insane. I remember there was a reddit thread
| about these things and one nugget was that the Oxford
| University was built before the Aztec Empire existed.
| bregma wrote:
| Harvard University was founded shortly after
| Shakespeare's death and decades before calculus was
| invented.
| nathancahill wrote:
| When the Pilgrims landed in North America, universities
| were already printing books in Mexico City.
| imp0cat wrote:
| How else could they move those large boulders? Mammoths,
| of course! :)
| rags2riches wrote:
| Diocletian's Palace, presently the Old Town of Split,
| Croatia, was decorated with Egyptian sphinxes because the
| romans also liked ancient artefacts.
| cal85 wrote:
| Another one: T-Rex lived much closer to the time when
| humans landed on the moon than to the time when the
| stegosaurus existed.
| gsky wrote:
| Indian Empire is older than Roman Empire if i'm not wrong and
| even America had emires before Europeans colonized. You need
| to read more history
| cncovyvysi wrote:
| He's comparing countries to ancient empires.
|
| Not locations.
| mminer237 wrote:
| ???
|
| What is the "Indian Empire"? The Mughal Empire? That lasted
| like 300 years.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| I guess if we're talking about the Indus Valley
| Civilization[1] we're looking at a range of 700-2000
| years based on how you define the start and end, but even
| that cannot be considered as equivalent to "India" which
| was formed as the union of multiple princely states
| around the general region after the end of colonial rule.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation
| nindalf wrote:
| At no point was all of modern India under one
| administrative entity until modern India. Even British
| India wasn't one state, it was a patchwork of provinces
| governed by the British and Princely States. Modern India
| only came into being in 1948, when the Princes were gently
| persuaded to take a hike.
|
| But you're right in the broader sense, that Indian people
| feel that India has been around for longer even if it
| hasn't. That is arguably more important to keeping the
| nation together than anything else.
| archon1410 wrote:
| That's not true? Maurya and Gupta empires spanned nearly
| all of the Indian subcontinent.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Except for the southern part of India, of course.
| ithkuil wrote:
| The Maurya empire lasted 137 years and the Gupta empire
| for 148 years and their reigns were not one after the
| other but were 500 years apart.
|
| Now depending how you're counting, and your definition of
| empire the Roman empire had a continuous history (with
| radical transformations over time but nevertheless
| continuous) for 2000 years.
|
| But hey, it all depends on how you define things.
| Undoubtedly the Indian subcontinent produced an
| incredibly deep and rich cultural history that spanned
| thousands of years.
|
| It was just slightly more fractured and dynamic. The
| Romans objectively held their firm (and often brutal)
| hold on a lot of land for a lot of time with a continuous
| identity, in a way that is not just to say that the same
| common culture continued on across various political
| arrangements that changed over time. Because I'd that's
| what we're talking about we could say that the whole of
| Europe has a kind of cultural union (fostered by the
| shared religion) that continued on till today.
|
| But the details of how you define things matter of
| course. Today you wouldn't consider the byzantine empire
| to be the Roman empire, but ask somebody from the 1300s
| living somewhere in the aegean see or anatolia and they
| will tell you they were Romans.
| nindalf wrote:
| Not the South of India. And they held areas in the North
| West that aren't part of modern India.
| archon1410 wrote:
| That's also not really true. It included large parts of
| south India, including present day states of Karnataka,
| Andhra Pradesh etc. It only did not include the southern
| tip.
| petesergeant wrote:
| The distance of time between us and the Romans is less (by
| ~1,000 years) than the time between the Romans and the
| building of the pyramids
| mik1998 wrote:
| I mean... most European countries (modulo some exceptions
| like Germany) existed (non-continuously) for at least a
| thousand years.
| derstander wrote:
| > I mean... most European countries (modulo some exceptions
| like Germany) existed (non-continuously) for at least a
| thousand years.
|
| This is interesting to me. What does it mean for a country
| to exist non-continuously? I can understand making the case
| under some sort of continuity despite dramatic changes in
| e.g. control of land or type of government. Sort of like a
| nation-state Ship of Theseus.
|
| But I don't understand how this works under the non-
| continuous case. If the temporal connection is broken how
| is it the same entity?
| rdlw wrote:
| Poland was occupied by Germany during WWII. The people
| still considered themselves Poles during this time, and
| the only reason there wasn't a 'Poland' was because of
| military strength, so it seems silly to say that early
| 1939 Poland and late 1944 Poland are different countries
| because of lack of continuity. Certainly, almost all
| Poles will tell you the country 'began' (it kind of had a
| soft start) in 966, and not in 1944.
|
| (Note: there was technically the government-in-exile in
| London, which you could argue maintained continuity, but
| I don't think it's necessary so I'm leaving that out of
| this.)
| JdeBP wrote:
| Cue all of the animated YouTube videos about Poland's
| border changes caused by WW2! (-:
| brabel wrote:
| What we call Poland today was part of so many kingdoms,
| empires, Duchy's it's not even funny. WWII was just the
| last of a long history of changes.
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| You could legitimately argue that it began in 1918
| though.
| rocqua wrote:
| This (and most other examples here) could just as easily
| be explained by nationalism. specifically nationalist
| projects to claim a much older heritage for the current
| nation state, to legitimize the current nation, and to
| give it a glorious and hard fought past so people will be
| proud of their country.
|
| Personally I think a lot of the idea of countries having
| existed 'for a long time' is the result of these
| nationalist projects that all occured in the 1800
| hundreds
| scns wrote:
| > This (and most other examples here) could just as
| easily be explained by nationalism.
|
| Tribalism?
| troad wrote:
| I don't think anyone claims it's /exactly/ the same
| entity (except in a legal sense after a government-in-
| exile is restored home, such as after World War II). But
| there's a general sense that a country can in some way be
| a continuation of a previous one, particularly if it
| shares the same language and a similar territory.
|
| Compare the borders of something like the Duchy of
| Bohemia and the modern-day Czech Republic. That's two
| states over a thousand years apart, separated by
| centuries of highs and lows, including uncountable
| foreign invasions and Austrian rule for four centuries.
| And yet there's something obviously parallel to them -
| states ruled from Prague, inhabited largely by Czech
| speakers, extending to virtually the same territory.
|
| Europe's natural and linguistic borders are relatively
| stable, so the emergence of similar states over similar
| territories in time is not unexpected.
| nindalf wrote:
| > a country can in some sense be a continuation of a
| previous one, particularly if it shares the same language
| and a similar territory.
|
| This is the sort of thing that's true, but only if you
| don't think about it deeply. People in England definitely
| spoke English, but that doesn't mean that we would be
| able to understand them. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote one of
| the first major works of literature in English, but 99.9%
| of Englishmen alive today wouldn't be able to understand
| a word of it because of how much English has changed.
|
| > In Gernade at the sege eek hadde he be Of Algezir, and
| riden in Belmarye. At Lyeys was he, and at Satalye, Whan
| they were wonne; and in the Grete See At many a noble
| aryve hadde he be.
|
| This book needs to be _translated_ into English for us to
| understand it, despite it being written in an older form
| of English.
|
| And obviously, English isn't a special case. Every
| language has evolved over time, to the point where it's
| nearly impossible to understand a few hundred years
| later. So sure, we think the people who lived in this
| city a few hundred years ago are our countrymen, but
| realistically we wouldn't be able to speak a word to each
| other.
| troad wrote:
| > This is the sort of thing that's true, but only if you
| don't think about it deeply.
|
| I have a linguistics degree and a passion for historical
| linguistics that will result in me talking your ear off
| about Indo-European ablaut, so this is probably the first
| time in my life I've ever been accused of failing to
| think deeply about language variation / change!
|
| But I do agree with tsunamifury's comment - what you say
| is interesting, but rather beside the point. What's
| relevant is a sense of continuity, not whether the modern
| speakers would understand the original language or not.
| (I'm unsure why the latter would be relevant at all?) As
| Benedict Anderson has argued, a nation is above all an
| _imagined community_ , so what's relevant is that Czech
| speakers picture a sense of continuity with the speakers
| of Slavic dialects in 1000 AD, and not with - say - the
| speakers of Celtic or Germanic dialects spoken at the
| same time.
|
| (It's worth noting that your example is fairly
| unrepresentative, by the by. English is a language with
| an unusually high rate of change (though I'm surprised
| you went with Chaucer, which many educated English
| speakers can largely follow, and not something like
| Beowulf, which no English speaker could understand
| without training). It's also worth noting that the Slavic
| languages are languages with an unusually low rate of
| change, so a text as old as Chaucer would be relatively
| much easier for Czech speakers to read.)
| nindalf wrote:
| I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you thought so. I
| meant it is a widely held belief among most people. They
| would feel a stronger affinity for their ancestors from a
| thousand years ago than for their neighbour, if their
| neighbour looked different to them.
|
| I meant to say that this idea that the people 1000 years
| ago being "my people" doesn't hold up to close
| inspection. There is no continuity in a meaningful sense
| if you can't communicate with them, wouldn't agree with
| them on anything even if we could, and couldn't even find
| a common activity to do together. They'd be about as
| alien as a green man from Mars. But it doesn't matter,
| because you're not going to convince people to stop
| idealising ancestors.
| aryonoco wrote:
| This is true of some languages which have a high rate of
| change, such as English, but much less true of others. As
| a native Persian speaker for example, I can read the
| Shahnameh (Book of Kings) of Ferdowsi, which was written
| around 980 (very much contemporary of Beowulf), and
| understand about 95% of it. Nearly every literate Iranian
| would be able to read it without an issue, and at most
| modern prints have footnotes to explain the words which
| have fallen out of use.
|
| Not every language changes at the rate English does.
| brabel wrote:
| > I meant to say that this idea that the people 1000
| years ago being "my people" doesn't hold up to close
| inspection.
|
| I think what you're saying is absolutely true, and a
| better example would be culture in general. There's a
| certain continuity in the cultural practices of a people
| in a certain region, with religion being one of the most
| resilient... but also other things like food, music and,
| of course, language.
|
| However, all of those change over time. It's funny for me
| that the Americans of today would almost certainly
| consider the Americans of the 1950's a bunch of racists
| and homophobes. A culture can change over time so much as
| to be more different in 75 years than when actually
| compared with that of other countries. The continuity
| exists but change can be very fast. Look at the culture
| of any European "country" and you'll see just how much
| change happens. An extreme example, perhaps: the Swedes
| of the year 1000 compared with the Swedes of 2000. The
| people inhabiting what we call Sweden today were Vikings
| back then. I don't believe they had a concept of Sweden
| yet, as a country, though the regions around Stockholm
| (which didn't exist yet) and Uppsala (a small region
| which later grew far North and South to form Sweden
| proper) seem to have already had a sort of cultural
| identity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians).
| These people were raiders and conquerors - they may have
| founded the Kievan Rus state and served as elite guards
| in the Byzantine Empire, which shows just how much of a
| bad ass warriors they were. How does present-day liberal,
| tolerant and egalitarian Swedes relate to their
| ancestors? If they could meet today, the modern fella
| would lose their head in no time, literally.
| int_19h wrote:
| I don't know about Swedes, but here's (a subset of)
| modern Norwegians:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxOSqSUgNzE
| anon84873628 wrote:
| England is also a funny example because one of their
| defining traits is the cultural continuity of the
| monarchy. Which, as I understand it, is the main
| justification for why the monarchy still exists today. A
| person from Chaucer's time transported to London today
| would have no trouble figuring out who's the king.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| > Geoffrey Chaucer wrote one of the first major works of
| literature in English, but 99.9% of Englishmen alive
| today wouldn't be able to understand a word of it because
| of how much English has changed.
|
| That is true for Beowulf, but not for Chaucer. If you
| just read the words in Chaucer, pronouncing them exactly
| as you would if your were sounding them out, you will be
| able to understand pretty much the entire thing after at
| most a few hours practice.
|
| We did this in my freshman English class and it was a lot
| of fun.
| neilkk wrote:
| > states ruled from Prague, inhabited largely by Czech
| speakers, extending to virtually the same territory.
|
| More like two polities which share a capital city, but
| barely have either a language or a geography in common.
| The idea that Bohemia is essentially Czechia has no more
| reliable historical basis than belief that it belongs to
| Greater Germany, or to Czechoslovakia.
| praptak wrote:
| I can speak of Poland which had a discontinuity of 123
| years. For most practical purposes Poland 1918 was _not_
| Poland 1795. It had none of the military alliances nor
| administrative obligations, just a new country out of
| nothing.
|
| The only continuity was in the collective mind of people
| who identified as Polish and grabbed the opportunity to
| fight and (re-)establish their own country.
|
| Now if you look at the continuity of ideas, it gets
| pretty philosophical so we could leave it to
| philosophers... if it wasn't for the fact that people use
| the ideas to justify wars. I don't have a confident
| answer for continuity between "being Polish in 1795" and
| "being Polish in 1918".
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Mostly through people still living in the same place
| remembering the glory days of old. If you look at Poland
| and Lithuania, which became Poland-Lithuania, which
| roughly split so that Poland went into Prussia and
| Lithuania into Russia; where Prussia lasted for 100 years
| and ended with WW1 where Poland re-emerged and had their
| common sense of identity enhanced by Hitler almost
| immediately re-invading, and Lithuania existing as part
| of the USSR for some additional 100 years before breaking
| out and doing their own thing.
|
| There's still a cultural identity in these places. The
| people living in them weren't replaced or relocated,
| primarily the flag and regent.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| State of Israel had 2000 years of disconinuity, both the
| state and the (spoken) language.
| gerikson wrote:
| Prussia lasted until 1947 (de jure) even if it had been
| subsumed into the German Reich in 1932:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussia
| lloeki wrote:
| > What does it mean for a country to exist non-
| continuously?
|
| What does "country" means? State? Geography? Leadership?
| Ancestry? People?
|
| If you get far back enough the birth of France starts
| with Gaul which bears more than a passing resemblance
| with today's France:
|
| https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/3044d40d-8af2-47aa-81e5-
| 785...
|
| And around 50BC with Vercingetorix surrendering to the
| Romans at Alesia the tide turns and it gets
| administratively split up largely to ensure they don't
| come together as a force against the Roman Empire again.
| Then as the Roman Empire starts showing cracks, various
| local powers emerge again:
|
| https://www.alex-bernardini.fr/histoire/images/division-
| gaul...
|
| Then "France" itself starts to exist since Clovis I
| united Franks in 481 and around 511 looks somewhat the
| same as today again if you squint hard enough:
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fb/3b/79/fb3b7985c2063f6a9839c6
| 918...
|
| But then in 840 it gets split in three after infighting
| among Charlemagne grandchildren, tearing the whole thing
| apart again:
|
| https://www.lhistoire.fr/sites/lhistoire.fr/files/img_por
| tfo...
|
| Middle one's fate is to dwindle, west one will become
| France, right one will become Germany.
|
| France's shape will then vary a lot through time,
| alliances, weddings, and battles, sometimes eaten at on
| the east, west, north, south, but more or less
| gravitating around the center part.
|
| But then here comes Prussia in 1870, then WW1, then WW2,
| culminating in the partial occupation then administration
| of northern and western France between 1940-42 and a
| _literal fork_ of France leadership and government:
| France de Vichy led by Petain in the south east, France
| Libre led by De Gaulle exiled in London. In theory the
| Vichy government was also leading occupied the north of
| France but in practice it was ruled by Germany.
|
| 1942 comes and Germany resolves the conundrum by
| forcefully merging south with north, France de Vichy
| becomes devoid of any power (not that it had much before,
| being a satellite state of Germany), France is de facto a
| part of Germany, essentially leaving only France Libre as
| an actual French government, which is not even in any
| part of the territory!
|
| So again, what does "country" means? State? Geography?
| Leadership? Ancestry? People? There's definitely some
| ship of Theseus going on along these 2k years, as well as
| forks, takeovers, infighting, and whatnot. This abridged
| version only highlights so much as there's much more
| intricacy to it, reality is incredibly messy, yet somehow
| "France" going all the way back to Gaul over 2k years
| carries some sense.
| nottorp wrote:
| Before the european revolutions in the 19th century, the
| notion of a national state didn't really exist.
|
| It was more about who controls what. Doesn't mean the
| actual population of the controlled areas changed much.
|
| To give an example from my country's history, Romania has
| been divided into 3 provinces until very recent
| (historically speaking) times.
|
| The first unification happened in 1600 when Michael the
| Brave, the king of the southernmost province, managed to
| take control of all 3 for about a year. He didn't
| proclaim himself king of Romania, he called himself king
| of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania.
|
| 100-150 years earlier, Stephen the Great, the king of
| Moldavia hit Wallachia militarily several times during
| his reign... not to conquer it and unify but to place a
| king friendly to him on the throne.
|
| Pretty sure you can find examples like this in any
| country's history. Germany and Italy for sure, since
| they've been divided politically into smaller provinces
| for a thousand years.
| groestl wrote:
| I think non-continuous succession of the same entity
| comes down to using or grandfathering the law, claiming
| the same assets, but also honoring liabilities of the
| predecessor. It's the same as with companies.
| eesmith wrote:
| Was Iceland a country when it was founded? Or later, with
| the start of the Icelandic Commonwealth? Did it end being
| a country after the pledge of fealty to the Norwegian
| king in 1262?
|
| If it was always a country, then go west. When Eric the
| Red founded Greenland, was it a European country? Did it
| become a country? After the Norse died, the Danish-
| Norwegians still claimed sovereignty, and reestablished a
| colony. The place is now a constituent country of the
| Kingdom of Denmark.
| jononor wrote:
| Some examples were given as answers, occupations etc. But
| even when nothing like that happens, in the "continuous"
| case - a country is still undergoing changes. Laws,
| language, culture, people, etc are not the same 100s of
| years later. So even that is kind of a Ship of Theseus
| type of challenge...
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| Assuming I don't die too early, Portugal will have existed
| continuously for 900 years during my lifetime (founded in
| 1143). It was administered by a governor appointed by a
| spanish king for 60 years at one point, but never stopped
| being a distinct country.
| neilkk wrote:
| This isn't true. The majority of countries are much younger
| than this. The thousand year old ones are the exceptions.
|
| Many countries have an 'origin story' which implies that
| they are the same thing as random countries or regions
| which had similar names/languages/locations but in the vast
| majority cases these are something between a loose
| approximation and a myth.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I think the above commenter's point is that "countries"
| doesn't just mean the formal nation state, but the
| cultural group. The nation of China was created on 1949.
| China is much older than 75 years. Likewise, Germanic
| tribes existed as far back as the Ancient World.
| neilkk wrote:
| But the only real connection between 'Germanic tribes'
| and the modern state of Germany is that people from the
| latter believe the former to be their forefathers. They
| are not genetically closer to them than other Europeans,
| nor do they speak the same language or call themselves
| the same word or have the same lifestyle or inhabit the
| same places.
|
| During the Yugoslav period, there was a minority group of
| Bulgarian migrants in one region of Yugoslavia. Like most
| linguistic groups they adopted the national language and
| believed themselves to be Yugoslav. However their group
| was sometimes referred to as 'Macedonian' because the
| corner of Yugoslavia near Bulgaria is also near Macedonia
| in Greece. They now have their own country (and language
| - whose only differences from Serbo-Croat are those which
| were intentionally introduced), and many believe
| themselves to be the descendants and cultural and
| spiritual heirs of Alexander the Great (even though
| Alexander reigned over and left an influence over a
| region bigger than Europe).
|
| All countries have things like this in their history.
| It's just that generally they are a few hundred years
| further away.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| No, there are continuities in language. It's changed over
| time, but it's still descended from those older cultures.
| French has it's roots in Frankish people that settled
| there in the migration period, with Latin and other
| influence. It's not just people arbitrarily claiming
| lineage. There are also specifics in culture and
| tradition, e.g. Christmas trees date back to pagan
| Germanic festivals.
| neilkk wrote:
| Modern German is no closer to the language of a randomly
| chosen 'Germanic Tribe' than English, Prussian, Danish,
| Yiddish, Swedish, Czech, etc.
|
| Most people living in what is now France would have
| spoken other languages than French well past the time of
| the Frankish people.
|
| Literally all over Europe, and a lot of the world, people
| have trees at Christmas.
| vik0 wrote:
| >During the Yugoslav period, there was a minority group
| of Bulgarian migrants in one region of Yugoslavia. Like
| most linguistic groups they adopted the national language
| and believed themselves to be Yugoslav. However their
| group was sometimes referred to as 'Macedonian' because
| the corner of Yugoslavia near Bulgaria is also near
| Macedonia in Greece.
|
| Wow, this is... biased. Sincerely, a Macedonian.
|
| People living in Macedonia (or, to avoid confusion,
| sigh... North Macedonia), have at one point (and even
| today, by some), yes, been called Bulgarians, but we've
| also been called Serbs and Greeks (in northern Greece,
| since Greece claims that everyone in Greece is Greek,
| lol). So, you claiming that we have only been Bulgarians,
| who, judging by the tone of your comment, got brainwashed
| into thinking we're Yugoslavs and after that Macedonians
| is absurd, to say the least.
|
| Serbs tried to make us Serbs before Bulgarians tried to
| make us Bulgarian, and they too failed. You can't make up
| an entire nation in a top-down manner, the people living
| in those lands first have to show signs that they
| consider themselves as a separate nation from the rest in
| any given region, which the Macedonians have, time and
| again.
|
| Now, to be fair to Serbs, there's a lot of Serbian
| cultural influence here, and a lot of people here do
| understand Serbian more than Bulgarian (even though
| Bulgarian and Macedonian are, on paper, more similar than
| Serbian and Macedonian), but still, they failed in trying
| to convince us to be Serbian rather than what we are now,
| a separate nation, Macedonian.
|
| Also, the modern idea of a separate, sovereign Macedonian
| state for the Macedonian nation has existed since at
| least 1880*
|
| > (and language - whose only differences from Serbo-Croat
| are those which were intentionally introduced)
|
| 1. And this is how I know you're not a Bulgarian because
| a true Bulgarian nationalist would claim that Macedonian
| is not its own language, but that it's only a dialect of
| Bulgarian.
|
| 2. There are a lot of differences on paper from Serbo-
| Croatian. It's closer to Bulgarian. Still, you don't
| create a language in a top-down manner. Read "Za
| makedonckite raboti" by Krste Petkov Misirkov.
|
| > and many believe themselves to be the descendants and
| cultural and spiritual heirs of Alexander the Great (even
| though Alexander reigned over and left an influence over
| a region bigger than Europe).
|
| Not sure how true this is. There are some definitely, but
| I feel they're more of a very loud minority, or at least
| not the majority by a long shot. Anybody who is seriously
| claiming they're _direct_ descendants of some guy who
| lived over 2 thousand years ago, and completely
| forgetting about everyone that has walked and mixed in
| that region between then and now (think of all the
| Greeks, Romans, Slavs, Jews, Ottomans, and everybody else
| I 'm not mentioning) is to have his mental faculties
| questioned. This goes not only for my fellow denizens,
| but for anybody claiming such a historical connection to
| a long-lost civilization, and especially so for those who
| are geographically not related (I could name names, but
| that would further diverge this conversation.) But at the
| same time to claim that people living in present-day
| Macedonia (the entire region, not just the state) have no
| connection whatsoever, is, as well, stupid.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assembly_of_Mace
| donia... * https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:A_M
| anifesto_from_...
| neilkk wrote:
| Thanks for proving my point!
| aikinai wrote:
| We are closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the building
| of the pyramids.
| josefx wrote:
| Cleopatra was also part of a greek dynasty that had been
| ruling egypt for centuries, since the times of Alexander
| the Great.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| Imagine being able to tell stories that were passed down to
| you, mouth to ear, for 20,000 years!
|
| Sadly, that civilization has perished in the last 100 years.
|
| Still, Australians are teaching the languages in their
| schools now. Finally. We might still yet hear a whisper...
| nottorp wrote:
| > I'm an Indian-American, and the country I was born in has
| only been around since 1947 and America since 1776.
|
| Hmm but India has existed in the form of multiple state
| entities that changed every hundred years or so for much
| longer than the 1k years.
|
| The Roman empire was also fragmented before its creation, and
| after. Look at how many Italian states divided the peninsula
| before the 19th century.
|
| Our modern notion of "country" is only a couple hundred years
| old.
|
| The Roman empire was the most unified state entity for a
| millenium. But their idea of unified was different from ours.
| ctoth wrote:
| Probably when thinking about these sorts of things the
| important number is the total number of lived human years,
| and not the number of chronological years.
| tempestn wrote:
| One cool thing about the purely additive notation is that you
| can then add numbers together by just gathering up all their
| characters, sorting largest to smallest, and combining any
| groups of 5 or more.
| tempestn wrote:
| Or in one step, by combining them from smallest to largest,
| combining and carrying as you go.
| chacham15 wrote:
| In the marketplace it was difficult to quickly discriminate
| between IIII and III as compared with II and III. When you get
| to 4, you have to start counting whereas with 3 or fewer, you
| can tell how many there are at a glance. That being said, this
| change was something that happened later in its history and as
| mentioned was more heavily done in specific use cases.
| vitus wrote:
| I recall seeing IIII in my Cicero class and expressing
| confusion, but being informed by the professor that said style
| was more common historically.
|
| The Wikipedia citation for 9 is Commentarii de bello Gallico
| (Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War), which
| interestingly comes from around the same timeframe (first
| century BC, toward the end of the Roman Republic).
| ghostly_s wrote:
| IMHO there's an obvious reason not mentioned: due to their
| position on the dial and convention IV and VI would typically be
| depicted upside down, increasing the likelihood of confusing them
| --particularly with a semi-literate populace.
| jhanoncomm wrote:
| The way I read a watch ignores the numbers anyway (arabic or
| roman) and I know where 9 is etc.
|
| if the device is upside down it is evident and I don't even try
| to read it, I right the clock or take off and restrap the
| watch.
| uzyn wrote:
| I have always believed this to be the reason.
| ekianjo wrote:
| semi literate populace did not have watches though...
| ummonk wrote:
| Clocktowers on the other hand...
| jeffxtreme wrote:
| This is mentioned in the article, but it's a small piece in a
| paragraph so understand why it could be missed:
|
| "Somebody thought IV was not easily understandable because it
| resembled VI..." (in paragraph 2)
| croes wrote:
| So why would IV and VI a problem and IX and XI not?
| flakeoil wrote:
| Maybe because IX and XI are not upside down, only at most 90
| degree angle.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Hmm... I'm skeptical that anyone able to read a clock in the
| first place would be unaware that 4 comes before 5 and 6 comes
| afterward.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Indeed - I have always thought (though I don't know if I was
| told this or just made it up) that IV was used, in general,
| over IIII because the latter could easily be mistaken for
| III, but as clock numerals are on a circle, dividing it into
| four equal quadrants, having a numeral of any sort gives very
| little additional information over a simple dots, pips or
| tick marks.
|
| So why use a numeral at all? Well, there's always those
| people who will think that it is _obviously_ wrong not to
| have numbers on a measuring instrument. Also, in early modern
| times, clocks were expensive items and expected to be ornate,
| especially as they were not all that good at keeping time.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I've always thought the "well balanced and looks better" was the
| simplest and most likely of the theories out there on why the
| IIII is used. Dials that use IV just look funny to me, but
| perhaps that's simply because they're rare.
| tylerneylon wrote:
| I had heard that IV might be considered sacrilegious, as the god
| Jupiter would have once been spelled IVPPITER, as I was used for
| modern J and V for modern U.
| dhosek wrote:
| There is a similar thing with Hebrew numerals1 where 15 and 16
| are usually written as tv and tz to avoid what would otherwise
| be forms of the name of God.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. The Hebrew numeral system, like the Greek numeral system is
| an almost-decimal system in that different letters are used for
| each of the different values, but the letters change by place
| value as well as by their individual value, so, e.g., 21 is
| written k where k stands for 20 and stands for 1.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| To clarify, those are 9 + 6 and 9 + 7; the forms to be
| avoided would be 10 + 5 and 10 + 6.
| mariotacke wrote:
| Interesting. I wonder if this is related to how Germans
| count/pronounce numbers. 21 in your example is
| "einundzwanzig" in German (or "ein-und-zwanzig", "one-and-
| twenty")
| zeven7 wrote:
| I think in this case it's because Hebrew is read right to
| left, so unrelated.
| dhosek wrote:
| Yep. The reversed order is also something that you see in
| archaic English, for example the nursery rhyme, "four and
| twenty blackbirds"
| jddj wrote:
| Japanese changed a couple too. From memory the
| pronunciation/written form of 4(?) was changed in some cases
| because it resembled death
| xandrius wrote:
| In Japanese its often the case that a kanji has different
| ways of reading it, so it's not just that.
| dhosek wrote:
| The only Japanese number form change I'm aware of is a
| special form for one (Yi ) (and possibly two Er ) to
| prevent them from being altered on checks into three (San
| ), but I'm far from an expert.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| Minor correction: that's tv and tz.
|
| bgdhvzkht - count one through nine
|
| yklmns`pts - count ten through ninety
|
| qrsht - count one hundred through four hundred
|
| so tv would be 406 while tv is 9+6=15
| dhosek wrote:
| D'oh that's what I get for trusting my mediocre Hebrew
| keyboarding skills. For those who don't know the Hebrew
| alphabet, both t and t are commonly transcribed as T (the
| former often as TH, but it's meant to be a German aspirated
| T sound rather than the English th).
| sebtron wrote:
| This is the same explanation I was given. In Roman times it was
| common to only write the first few letters of a word, just
| enough to be able to extrapolate the full word from the
| context. IV was a common abbreviation for IVPPITER.
| Vitaly_C wrote:
| I vaguely recall this was an important fact to know for a 90s
| puzzle video game.
|
| Maybe it was The Seventh Guest? Or Myst?
| hnbad wrote:
| I recall there being a clock face puzzle in The Seventh Guest
| but I couldn't tell you if it involved that fact.
| smrq wrote:
| Can't be Myst as they have their own base 25 numbering system
| :)
|
| (Ok, that originated from the sequel, but it's still canonical
| to the universe.)
| riffic wrote:
| it can go either way
| aftbit wrote:
| I knew that both forms were common because I was lucky enough to
| have a Latin teacher who assigned as extra credit "write this
| number in Roman numerals" and also accepted additive notation for
| this reason. He even argued that IIIIIIIIII could be a valid if
| cheesy alternative to X based on very early texts, but this might
| have just been a bluff. I never tried to write 123 as
| IIIII...III.
| narag wrote:
| As kibwen said, there wasn't a clear "standardized" form. Most
| rules were invented much later. "IC" was perfectly understood by
| Romans that would have used "MXMII" without a second thought.
|
| The reason of "IIII" is of usability for clocks that can be seen
| from different angles. Six can only be written as "VI" so "IV" is
| changed to "IIII" to prevent confusion.
|
| Of course there are all kind of urban legends and fake stories of
| kings requesting the number be written this or that way.
|
| In case someone doesn't know, a fun fact: "I" is one finger, "V"
| represent the open hand (think pinky and thumb in angle) and "X"
| both open hands united. So 1, 5, 10.
| gue5t wrote:
| This is one of the ways you can tell if an INTERCAL
| implementation is worth its salt.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| According to The Internet, this:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201115002205/https://www.washi...
| nescioquid wrote:
| In Latin, sometimes numbers have synonyms, like 18 (two from
| twenty or eight and ten). In my mind, the Roman system was very
| obvious. Then I learned to read a little French, and had genuine
| curiosity about the reasoning behind this soixante-dix-neuf
| character.
|
| edit: sometimes I wonder if arithmetic arose simply from naming
| numbers
| mckn1ght wrote:
| Yeah, the 90s in french always tripped me out. 91 = quatre-
| vingt-onze = four-twenty-eleven
| nescioquid wrote:
| I never can decide, but I think you have made the correct
| point. For me, it was "four twenties, nine and ten", which
| was only funny _because_ one said "sixty, nine and ten". I
| dunno, I love it and it terrifies me.
|
| The first time I went abroad, I was in a wine caveau and
| paying the teller. When she said the price, my mind went
| blank -- pitch black. She said "five" impatiently in every
| language I spoke -- even latin -- and I kept wondering, yes,
| but _what_ and five?
| gerikson wrote:
| Try learning to count in Danish.
| kettro wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigesimal
| rocqua wrote:
| French used to have a sort of base 20 numbering system.
|
| And it is more like our current number system arose because it
| makes arithmetic so much simpler.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Like the British used to have shillings?
| staplung wrote:
| Fun fact: in Roman numerals there is no _standard_ way to write
| numbers above 3999. There are basically two competing camps for
| how to write them. One with C 's and backwards C's acting kinda
| like parens and one with lines over the letters.
|
| On the other hand, they had semi-standard numerals for all sorts
| of odd fractions like 1/288 = .
| ummonk wrote:
| It's odd that they still use IX though, since that is
| indistinguishable from inverted XI (IV and VI, by contrast, are
| distinguishable even after rotation).
| 3ace wrote:
| Prior of this, I thought the clock in my home has a misprint or a
| defect product because of it use IIII instead of IV
| mark-r wrote:
| It took me a minute to realize that I even had a clock in the
| house with Roman numerals! Yes, it uses IIII.
|
| You'd think it would be easier to remember given that I had to
| change it less than a week ago.
| mayd wrote:
| If Roman numerals are printed around the perimeter of the clock
| face with the base of each numeral on the same circle, as opposed
| to printing the numerals horizontally, then the numerals towards
| the bottom are harder to read because they are nearly upside
| down. This makes it harder to distinguish quickly between IV and
| VI. One solution is to use IIII instead of IV.
| jurip wrote:
| Sandi Toksvig made the point in a QI episode that if you use
| IIII, you get a pleasing symmetry with the number of Vs and Xs on
| a clock face. Four numbers with only Is, four numbers with a V
| and four numbers with a X.
|
| I'd be surprised if that was the reason, but it's kind of neat.
|
| I II III IIII
|
| V VI VII VIII
|
| IX X XI XII
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| This is _exactly_ where I first learned about this style; I
| looked it up and loved it.
| hardstyle wrote:
| This is the Watchmaker's Four
| bhasi wrote:
| This is relatively well-known in watch circles as the
| "watchmaker's four".
| xxmarkuski wrote:
| I still remember vividly how I once wrote IIII instead of IV in
| an outline numbering at school and my teacher was furious about
| it and basically told me I was stupid for writing it that way. So
| glad these days are over.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| I'm sorry this happened to you. Sadly, the days of stupid and
| abusive teachers are far from over.
|
| I think you're focusing on the wrong thing here. If it hadn't
| been Roman numerals it would have been something else.
|
| Teachers are much the same as cops. Some go into those fields
| because they genuinely want to help people. Other go into them
| because they enjoy having power.
| ce4 wrote:
| "The Mystery of Numerical Notation on the Dial Plate - 4 is
| Expressed as IIII, not IV"
|
| Here is the uneditorialized headline. Especially it is called
| dial plate, not clock face.
| eps wrote:
| > The Seiko Museum Ginza
|
| Has someone been to this place? Is it worth a visit?
| Max-q wrote:
| When talking about wrong usage of Roman numbers, the first that
| comes to mind is a well known, and much copied, tattoo that
| writes 1975 not as MCMLXXV.
| djmips wrote:
| Which is?...
| Max-q wrote:
| Oh, I'm sorry, I thought everyone in the world had noticed
|
| Justin Bieber has his mothers birth year tattooed on his
| chest:
|
| I IX VII V
|
| instead of:
|
| MCMLXXV
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I guess I have only seen other dials than the article describes,
| where the 4 is actually IV. Maybe what the article describes is a
| regional thing.
| usr1106 wrote:
| I learned Roman numbers in school when I was nine. For me being
| interested in math it was logical that 4 consecutive symbols
| are against the rules and it needs to be IV.
|
| When I was 14 my grandmother died we got an old clock and it
| showed IIII. I came to the conclusion it's a poor piece of
| craftsmanship, the clockmaker just did not know math. Otherwise
| clocks with Roman numbers were not common at all where I lived.
|
| The old clock is still in my living room over 40 years later
| (not in a prominent place, I don't find it impressive anymore
| like I did when I was younger). When reading this I notice that
| numbers on the lower half are upside down. Had not paid
| attention to this for over 40 years.
| djmips wrote:
| Aesthetics seems like the best answer.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| My guess is that IIII was used before IV in various cases. So
| maybe a mistake or to reduce confusion.
| timbit42 wrote:
| My dad has fixed old pendulum and wind up clocks for years as a
| hobby. He also fixes old tube radios. There are half a dozen to a
| dozen clocks around his house at any time. Some have IIII and
| some have IV. I can't say I've seen one more than another.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Heh. When I was a teenager, I once convinced my parents not to
| buy a clock because it used IIII instead of IV. Clearly a
| counterfeit!
|
| Then we went home and noticed all the clocks in the house had
| IIII.
| hexo wrote:
| I've never seen such four on clock face, it was always IV
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-16 23:01 UTC)