As you know, there were very
variable measurement systems in Europe after the fall of the
Roman Empire, depending on the region within the same
country. It is difficult to say precisely why political
unity, when there was one in a given country, did not make
it possible to systematize the use of the same standard of
measurement throughout the country, because it is quite
astonishing to see that the cubit, the foot, the pound etc.
vary from one region to another during the medieval period.
The answer to this question on the variability and
versatility of measures is undoubtedly due to the fact that
the birth of modern nations has been accompanied by the
emergence of a rational State which has increasingly taken
the place of a rational administration (legal) of social
relationship. The French Revolution of 1789 carried out the
efforts at rationalization that we had seen develop with the
appearance of a strong State from the end of the wars of
religion and the reign of Louis XIV in France: the metric
system (based on a segment of the Greenwich meridian) in
base 10, makes it possible to obtain measurements of
surfaces, distances and volumes which are the same
everywhere and which do not vary according to whether one is
in Normandy, Lorraine or Provence. For those interested in
the point Didot (the printing point under the French
monarchy), its value was 1/72 of a foot (of the king's
foot)... which king's foot could not be a foot of English
king, nor a symbolic value as guinea was !
Le 25/01/2022 à 20:28, Henning Hraban
Ramm via ntg-context a écrit :
Am
25.01.22 um 18:27 schrieb Aditya Mahajan:
On Tue, 25 Jan 2022, Henning Hraban Ramm
via ntg-context wrote:
why didn’t "we" stick to
the Roman system?
All you need to do is look at the definitions of roman imperial
units to understand why we didn't stick to that:
An inch was the width of the base of the thumb, a foot, well
length of a foot, a fathom was the width of outstretched arms,
yard was the length of the man's belt, mile was 1000 paces of
marching roman soldiers, and so on.
Ah, of course. So “normalization” to some ruler’s shoe size was
already progress.
In India, from what I am aware, the
pre-imperial units of measurements had similar origins as
imperial. Length was based on width of fingers, cubit (also used
in other civilizations of the time), person-height and so on. As
with the imperial units, these definitions were not uniform and
went through a uniformization process in the middle ages.
However, India moved to imperial units with colonization, and
adopted metric system after Independence.
Some of the units, particularly for measurement of land area,
are still in use as they are effectively codified in the land
records.
Interesting.
Wikipedia has some summary of the ancient
and medieval systems in India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_units_of_measurement
But it got more complicated than that (particularly for time).
See, for example:
https://sites.google.com/site/mathematicsmiscellany/time-measurement-in-ancient-india
Oh, that is nice!
There is also this fascinating book which
covers the non-European history of mathematics (a lot of which
in ancient times was to do with units and measurements but more
importantly, calculations):
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691135267/the-crest-of-the-peacock
Yes, that’s probably worth reading.
Thank you!
Hraban
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an
entry to the Wiki!
maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl /
http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://context.aanhet.net
archive : https://bitbucket.org/phg/context-mirror/commits/
wiki : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________
--
Jean-Pierre Delange
Ancients&Moderns
Professeur Agrégé de Philosophie (HC)