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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

#171

Post by nindalf »

tsunamifury wrote: post #124
nindalf wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]

Look at the other response. So much better than yours.

You just call me dumb, not much I can respond to there. And the rest of your comment is barely coherent, can’t respond to that either.

Awful.

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

#172

Post by rags2riches »

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.

Diocletian's Palace, presently the Old Town of Split, Croatia, was decorated with Egyptian sphinxes because the romans also liked ancient artefacts.

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

#173

Post by Ekaros »

pier25 wrote: post #103
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!

Woah. The change happened over multiple generations but they must have noticed, no?

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...

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

#174

Post by ithkuil »

bell-cot wrote: post #166
ithkuil wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.…

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

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

#175

Post by nottorp »

swman wrote: post #61
kibwen wrote: post #15

> 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…

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.

> 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.

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

#176

Post by nottorp »

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…

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.

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

#177

Post by imp0cat »

selcuka wrote: post #131
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.

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

How else could they move those large boulders? Mammoths, of course! :)

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

#178

Post by gerikson »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #143
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…

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 ex…

Prussia lasted until 1947 (de jure) even if it had been subsumed into the German Reich in 1932:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussia

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

#179

Post by gerikson »

stevekemp wrote: post #158
JdeBP wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

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…

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.

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

#180

Post by szundi »

eesmith wrote: post #150
Ma8ee wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is so true and adds to the prev prev argument
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