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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

#141

Post by archon1410 »

nindalf wrote: post #119
gsky wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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's not true? Maurya and Gupta empires spanned nearly all of the Indian subcontinent.

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

#143

Post by marginalia_nu »

derstander wrote: post #104
mik1998 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... most European countries (modulo some exceptions like Germany) existed (non-continuously) for at least a thousand years.

> 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…

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.

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

#144

Post by saagarjha »

archon1410 wrote: post #141
nindalf wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's not true? Maurya and Gupta empires spanned nearly all of the Indian subcontinent.

Except for the southern part of India, of course.

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

#145

Post by troad »

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…

> 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.)

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

#146

Post by lloeki »

derstander wrote: post #104
mik1998 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... most European countries (modulo some exceptions like Germany) existed (non-continuously) for at least a thousand years.

> 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…

> 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 Vercingétorix surrendering to the Romans at Alésia 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/fb3b7985c2063f6a9839c6918...

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_portfo...

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 Pétain 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.

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

#147

Post by ithkuil »

archon1410 wrote: post #141
nindalf wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's not true? Maurya and Gupta empires spanned nearly all of the Indian subcontinent.

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.

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

#148

Post by ithkuil »

bell-cot wrote: post #129
nine_k wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conquero…

To her credit though she was one of the few Ptolemaic rules of Egypt who even bothered learning the Egyptian language

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

leononame wrote: post #139
selcuka wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another fun fact is that mammoths weren't extinct yet when the pyramids were built.

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.

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by eesmith »

Ma8ee wrote: post #133
brandensilva wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

In our current calendar system I don't always celebrate my birthday on my birthday.
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