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On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV

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Re: On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV

#121

Post by GrumpySloth »

rdlw wrote: post #107
derstander wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

You could legitimately argue that it began in 1918 though.

Re: On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV

#122

Post by jurip »

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

Re: On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV

#124

Post by tsunamifury »

nindalf wrote: post #118
troad wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

> 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 E…

[flagged]

Re: On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV

#125

Post by rocqua »

nine_k wrote: post #117
staplung wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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.

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.

Re: On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV

#127

Post by xandrius »

tsunamifury wrote: post #120
schoen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_Ottoman... > After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II, Ottoman sultans came to regard them…

Yea I think it’s a fair argument that the last gasp of the Roman Empire ended in world war 1

If you forget Italian fascists trying to bring it back, otherwise you could push it to the end of WWII

Re: On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV

#128

Post by rocqua »

rdlw wrote: post #107
derstander wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

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

Re: On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV

#129

Post by bell-cot »

nine_k wrote: post #117
staplung wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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.

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".

Re: On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV

#130

Post by xandrius »

jddj wrote: post #80
dhosek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a similar thing with Hebrew numerals¹ where 15 and 16 are usually written as תו and תז 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 כא whe…

Japanese changed a couple too. From memory the pronunciation/written form of 4(?) was changed in some cases because it resembled death

In Japanese its often the case that a kanji has different ways of reading it, so it's not just that.
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