Re: OT: Units (was Re: Numbers in Qthen|gai (and in Tyl Sjok) [long])

Hi!

Tristan McLeay <conlang@...> writes:
>...
> > The really evil Swedish unit is the _mil_, or metric mile, of 10km.
> > It's just
> > asking for evil mistranslations.
>
> Henrik:
> > If course 'pound' (de: Pfund, nl: pond) is also exactly 500g in
> > Germany and the Netherlands and presumable in many other countries
> > that are not Great Britain for instance.
>
> I think you missed that one---a mil in Australia is a millimetre or
> millilitre.
Indeed, I missed that.  Funny. :-)

>...
> Do Europeans use metric cups (250 mL), teaspoons (5 mL) and tablespoons
> (20 mL)?
Well, not really.  There are two things:
   a) a cup does not usually occur in German recipes.  If it does, for
      some strange reason, one uses any tea or coffee cup at hand for
      measuring.  It's not a standard size.
      (I'd personally approximate a cup to 200ml, so I should pay
      more attension whether the recipe was from Australia...)

   b) Teaspoons and tablespoons do occur frequently in recipes and
      are indeed quite standardised in recipes, but to 5ml and
      15ml, resp.  But few people would know, and I doubt it
      has any official status -- you'd usually use a teaspoon or
      a tablespoon to measure. :-)
      But these do occur.

> But while on the subject of measurements, what're they in your(pl)
> conlangs?
Without any conculture, my languages would adjust to the units in use
where the lang is used.  E.g. Tyl Sjok has words for meter and inch.
Back-linking to the beginning of the original thread, the sub-units in
Tyl Sjok use different bases.  These bases are lexicalised.  E.g. for
metric units, 10 is the base for fractions, for inch, sub-units are
dual.  And then there is the issue about orders of units -- this is
expecially interesting for 'second' in Tyl Sjok.  I will not get into
detail here -- the interesting reader should read the PS or PDF
version of Tyl Sjok's grammar.

> know what the pre-metric German ...
Elle, Spann, Fuder etc.?  Very interesting.  I don't know definition's
though.

**Henrik

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