181–190 of 270 posts
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
Yeah, the 90s in french always tripped me out. 91 = quatre-vingt-onze = four-twenty-eleven
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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 mean... most European countries (modulo some exceptions like Germany) existed (non-continuously) for at least a thousand years.
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> 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 in…
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 sen…
Not every language changes at the rate English does.
I vaguely recall this was an important fact to know for a 90s puzzle video game. Maybe it was The Seventh Guest? Or Myst?
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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.
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 southerner…
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.
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> 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 in…
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 sen…
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.
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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.
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!
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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.
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.
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".