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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

#201

Post by mnw21cam »

brandensilva wrote: post #105
owlninja wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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.

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

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

#202

Post by brandensilva »

mnw21cam wrote: post #201
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.

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

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.

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

#203

Post by Max-q »

djmips wrote: post #164
Max-q wrote: post #153

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.

Which is?...

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

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

#204

Post by pyuser583 »

rocqua wrote: post #125
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.

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.

She’s remembered because of her alliance with Mark Anthony.

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

#205

Post by Amorymeltzer »

jurip wrote: post #122

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

This is exactly where I first learned about this style; I looked it up and loved it.

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

#206

Post by sorokod »

kibwen wrote: post #195
xandrius wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

There is a Russian name for Istanbul - Царьгра́д (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.

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

#207

Post by nathancahill »

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.

When the Pilgrims landed in North America, universities were already printing books in Mexico City.

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

#208

Post by wolfi1 »

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.…

Troglodytes? cave dwellers?

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

#209

Post by jbandela1 »

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…

> 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.

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

#210

Post by jbandela1 »

schoen wrote: post #99
morcus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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