Ryan of Tinellb wrote: ↑Sun Sep 29, 2019 2:58 am
Well, mass actually. What are the origins of the various imperial units of mass? The articles I have read are equally likely to say "an ounce is 1/16 of a pound" as "a pound is 16 ounces", so I want to know which one was first.
How were they decided? They've been since defined in reference to the grain; did that come first or later?
If you don't know, please tell me the original definition of your conworld's mass unit.
The ounce is from the Roman uncia, one twelfth of a libra. The uncia could also be a measurement of distance, one twelfth of a foot, from which we get the word 'inch'. So, I think the uncia was probably conceptually just a subdivision of a base unit.
The libra, or pound, literally means a balance, but I'm guessin that's a derivation from the unit of weight, rather than vice versa, because the word is also in greek, without, wiktionary says, that meaning. The greek form gives us 'litre' - it's probably a substrate word in the mediterranean, accordin to wiktionary. iven that 'litre' has come to be a unit of fluid volume, and iven that 'pound' comes from the expression 'libra pondo', "a libra by weight", I'm uessin that 'libra' itself was also, no pun intended, fluid in what it measured. It was probably just a word like 'unit', I would guess - that is, a conceptual division, rather than a specific reference. And if there was ever a specific reference weight it was based on, you'd probably have to look in pre-Indo-European cultures of the mediterranean.
It's worth bearin in mind that most of these measurements had many, many different definitions, so it doesn't make sense to link them too closely to specific references, outside of specific legal regimes - a pound in the UK in the middle aes could be anything from 350 grams to 800 grams, depending on system and the local measures. And indeed, even what sort of thing they measured was often variable - a pound has been a measure of weight, of value, or volume, of mass, of width/area, of force, and no doubt other things too...