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I think China did try a couple times to do non-metal coinage, but it didn't really take.
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Jul 28, 2022 02:44
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Money is such a good tool in everyday life Too bad the rich ruined it.
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Jul 28, 2022 02:44
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feedmegin posted:Let me tell you how the world measures time... Now I want a coin the size of a clock face that can be easily subdivided into wedge segments of five, ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty "cents" (out of sixty "cents" per clock dollar)
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Jul 28, 2022 02:50
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Didn't Pieces of Eight work that way (hence the name)?
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Jul 28, 2022 02:51
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I have heard that! It seems really weird to my modern understanding of coinage, like imagining having a bunch of shards in my sack until I can swap them out for full coins or something.
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Jul 28, 2022 02:56
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Brawnfire posted:I have heard that! It seems really weird to my modern understanding of coinage, like imagining having a bunch of shards in my sack until I can swap them out for full coins or something. It was done with dollar coins, as well. 1/8 of a dollar = a bit, hence a quarter being described as "two bits."
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Jul 28, 2022 02:58
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Holy poo poo, I always thought that was figurative. I'm learning lots about currency!
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Jul 28, 2022 03:03
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At one point Australia was having a dire currency shortage, having no ability to mint it and a very long supply-chain to bring it in. So the Governor punched the center out of the coins on hand, declaring that for internal use the central-disc waa one coin and the toroidal ring a seperate coin.
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Jul 28, 2022 03:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:And from that perspective, there's times throughout history where people just physically split coins when they need smaller fractions of value. I was just thinking that. These divisions make a lot more sense for a society that physically cuts coins and where illiteracy is still common. edit: the United States had a similar history of difficulty acquiring metal coins right up until the mid-late 19th century gold rushes in America and Australia. One reason both sides in the civil war printed money so fast was that there physically wasn't enough bullion in North America in 1860 to finance the war. Though I suppose state finances had been heading in that direction generally ever since the late 15th century. Anyway there was one Han emperor who let the peasants buy molds for casting copper coins and I don't recall the details but it was about as much of a disaster as you'd expect. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jul 28, 2022 |
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Jul 28, 2022 04:15
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china did spend about 200 years using paper money instead of coins before the spanish silver started flooding in and made silver coinage for the entirety of china practical, but the central government abused the ability to print money to predictable effect (several times)
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Jul 28, 2022 04:44
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think China did try a couple times to do non-metal coinage, but it didn't really take. They went on to fiat currency very early, during the Yuan, which itself was a kind of continuation of Tang "flying money," and then reversed back to purely metal coinage during the Ming because, well, the Yuan were into it thus it was bad. In fairness they did not do a great job at controlling inflation. They did in prior times have some weirder forms of currency, like knife money  Of course if we want to talk about non-metal coinage, why not talk about the greatest of them all, reigning champion of big boys and incredibly useful illustration of the social nature of banking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones Arglebargle III posted:
It was Han Wen, yeah, absolute shitshow. I think there was a Tang emperor who repeated it.
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Jul 28, 2022 04:53
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I've seen a few period pieces where bankers will just have scales hanging around while they're counting their coffers, and it makes more sense if the physical weight and mass of the coinage is going to be in question. Might also make it easier to count large amounts at once. Managing the physical coinage is always going to be messy. I can't actually find much about coin splitting, but also the medieval stuff is getting drowned out by crypto poo poo. I have noticed that a lot of medieval coins tend to have big crosses on them that coincidentally would make perfect guidelines for splitting the coin up into fragments. I've certainly heard of that having to do with Spanish currency, but I can't find direct confirmation, and it seems that confusingly "piece of eight" seems to refer to the specific coin that was supposed to be worth 8 reals rather than the other way round, which is the opposite of how those words normally work. I guess it would also be a really annoying way of creating change that most people would avoid if they had the option.
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Jul 28, 2022 05:34
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Money scales still get used for both coins and bills. Places that have enough cash flow that hand counting isn't reliable use them all the time.
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Jul 28, 2022 05:44
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Tulip posted:So China was doing decimal stuff pretty early - pretty much from the adoption of coinage. This isn't that surprising since Chinese pretty much does base 10 for as long as we have it. No big moment of converting from base 60 to base 10 or something. If you use only copper as currency then the wealthy have to deal with high masses. If you use only silver as currency then the rural poor cannot use coins at all. And if you use both then you have to deal with a fluctuating exchange rate between them.
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Jul 28, 2022 05:51
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think China did try a couple times to do non-metal coinage, but it didn't really take. Correct me if I remember wrong, but don't some eurozone countries use plastic for the lowest cent pieces? I seem to recall getting some.. in poland or hungary or something like that.
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Jul 28, 2022 05:56
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Was the tang dynasty based or cringe
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Jul 28, 2022 06:13
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SlothfulCobra posted:I can't actually find much about coin splitting, but also the medieval stuff is getting drowned out by crypto poo poo. I have noticed that a lot of medieval coins tend to have big crosses on them that coincidentally would make perfect guidelines for splitting the coin up into fragments. I've certainly heard of that having to do with Spanish currency, but I can't find direct confirmation, and it seems that confusingly "piece of eight" seems to refer to the specific coin that was supposed to be worth 8 reals rather than the other way round, which is the opposite of how those words normally work. Eh, makes sense to me. It's a piece [with a value] of eight [reals], not a one-eigth-real piece. Clearly, America came along two centuries later and misunderstood the term 
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Jul 28, 2022 06:34
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niche question: does anyone have a lot to say itt about the history of color? a professor i knew from way back when was on the university's social media talking about how not only did homer not have a word for the color blue--he described the seas as the color of "wine dark"--but neither did ancient hebrey and assyrian texts, icelandic sagas, or hindu vedas. blue was mentioned in ancient egyptian texts though.
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Jul 28, 2022 13:29
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That's more of a linguistics question. The study of color words is extremely well developed. Generally speaking, all languages can describe all colors, but may have more or fewer top level color words than you're used to. For example, in older japanese, midori (green) is a shade of ao (blue). Meanwhile, in Russian, dark and light blue are separate color categories. Cyan and navy blue would not be considered shades of the same thing. Iirc, all studied languages have words for at least white, black, and red, and there's a fairly well documented order that additional top-level color words are added
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Jul 28, 2022 13:42
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cheetah7071 posted:Iirc, all studied languages have words for at least white, black, and red, and there's a fairly well documented order that additional top-level color words are added The order is here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/thecon...heory-why-84117 quote:If a language had only two terms, they were always black and white; if there was a third, it was red; the fourth and fifth were always green and yellow (in either order); the sixth was blue; the seventh was brown; and so on. ulmont fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Jul 28, 2022 |
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Jul 28, 2022 13:52
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Yeah there's a lot of things out there that cover the development of color words. Vox has a nice video on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg Usually blue is one of the last "basic" colors to show up, and some cultures today still don't differentiate much between blue and green (although I think Egypt apparently developed the idea of blue irregularly fast?), and then you get your more complex shades and tints after that. I think before this was studied in depth, there was a guy who theorized that greeks were colorblind, but that theory's been discredited. I think I heard an NPR piece on how you actually can see a similar thing happening with language in general with the birth of a new sign language. Basically when you get a bunch of deaf people who don't already know sign language into the same room, they will all on their own start developing gestures to communicate, and the later generations of people using that language will start developing more complex ideas to have words for. I'm not sure how much of that is that it takes time for more words to develop or if older generations get complacent with the language after a point and stop developing, leaving work for the next generation to do.
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Jul 28, 2022 14:10
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ulmont posted:The order is here: It's also related to the number of dyes and pigments available to a culture. Natural colors have a fairly limited palette, so the developed color vocabulary would reflect the colors they encountered in daily life and needed to describe. When they encountered a new color, they would shoehorn it into the definitions they already knew. If the color became common, only then would it get its own name. The best example of this is orange. In England, they got along just fine with red and yellow, and most stuff we would today call orange was just called red (red hair, red-breasted robins, etc.) It was only when the fruit started appearing in large numbers that the name of the fruit became a descriptor for the color in between red and yellow.
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Jul 28, 2022 14:20
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there are some cute little tests you can do too, they did it with some limited contact indigenous people in the 70s i wanna say who did not have a meaningful linguistic distinction between "green" and "blue", and had them try and pick the odd one out of a selection of colours that to my eyes screamed "green, green, green, blue, green" but they didn't find as meaningful a distinction as i did. i also wanna add that there is some contention here because it's not a total academic consensus and there are criticisms of people taking what we do know and making all sorts of goofy assumptions and over extrapolations as to why they are, like how ancient greek people must have been colourblind or similar. kind of pop-lingustics, i guess.
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Jul 28, 2022 14:38
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Ancient Greeks weren't color blind in the sense that they had problems with their cone cells (as far as we can tell anyway, when was the last time you saw an ancient Greek's cone cells?). Rather, their language supported metaphorical constructions about visual appearances that seem to us strange, and aren't always evidently based on color as we experience it. People use the phrase "wine-dark sea" because its really good in English and seems to capture a sense of the Homeric phrase so that we can understand what the poet means. But it's worth noting that there is nothing equivalent to "dark" in the Greek adjective here, it's just oinops, "wine-eyed/wine-faced" or less literally "wine-looking". The introduction of the concept of "dark" makes people at some remove think of it as a color statement and downstream from that people conclude the Greeks all thought the sea was purple. The poetic phrase though is just likening some unspecific quality of the appearance of the sea to wine.
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Jul 28, 2022 15:01
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skasion posted:Ancient Greeks weren't color blind in the sense that they had problems with their cone cells (as far as we can tell anyway, when was the last time you saw an ancient Greek's cone cells?). Rather, their language supported metaphorical constructions about visual appearances that seem to us strange, and aren't always evidently based on color as we experience it. We use colors metaphorically all the time. We may say someone looks blue, not meaning they're literally blue but just that they're sad. Ancient people could use language that way, too. Color to describe a mood rather than a literal color is not a modern invention.
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Jul 28, 2022 15:28
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It's still odd to me, I have such a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that there are people out there who didn't have distinct words for green (the color of leaves and such) and blue (the color of the sky, most water). Those are such every day things.
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Jul 28, 2022 15:55
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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One example I remember encountering is χλωρός, which is usually translated as green (chloroform, chlorophyll etc.), in Sappho's poem 31 it describes the pallor of the speaker's skin when experiencing intense emotional distress ( maybe jealousy). But it's also used once for honey in the Iliad and once for sand in the Odyssey. It's also used metaphorically meaning "fresh" in several texts, for all kinds of foodstuffs, even cheese and fish.
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Jul 28, 2022 15:59
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CoolCab posted:there are some cute little tests you can do too, they did it with some limited contact indigenous people in the 70s i wanna say who did not have a meaningful linguistic distinction between "green" and "blue", and had them try and pick the odd one out of a selection of colours that to my eyes screamed "green, green, green, blue, green" but they didn't find as meaningful a distinction as i did. There was a documentary that had something like that but it was a staged recreation by someone who misunderstood the research rsther than actual science.
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Jul 28, 2022 16:08
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PittTheElder posted:It's still odd to me, I have such a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that there are people out there who didn't have distinct words for green (the color of leaves and such) and blue (the color of the sky, most water). Those are such every day things. This is to some extent cognitive biasing, notably for the sky. If you ask a person from a culture that doesn't have "blue" what color the sky is, you don't usually get "green," you might get "white" (for the clouds) or "empty" or "it doesn't have a color" or "it's the sky." Like the ontological fact of color is that it's a spectrum of wavelengths, and our words for color create boundaries on which wavelengths are seen as more similar to each other or less similar. There's basically infinite ways you could chop it up and the way we chop it up makes us more likely to say that things are one color vs another, without any difference in the actual physical thing being seen. But once we're biased to think of certain things as "blue" we fill in the gaps and are more confident about saying they're blue, even though the sky is frequently grey or black or white or bronze or golden, and if you're in a bad situation green or purple. The Lone Badger posted:If you use only copper as currency then the wealthy have to deal with high masses. If you use only silver as currency then the rural poor cannot use coins at all. And if you use both then you have to deal with a fluctuating exchange rate between them. Actual problem for the Song dynasty, or at least for the peasants, that they had to pay taxes in silver despite doing daily work in copper. Stairmaster posted:Was the tang dynasty based or cringe Wu Zetian was based, Wuzong was cringe.
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Jul 28, 2022 17:21
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i will never reveal the Wu Zetian secret
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Jul 28, 2022 17:22
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I would be entirely unsurprised if there was a language where the word for blue was literally "sky colored"
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Jul 28, 2022 17:30
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cheetah7071 posted:I would be entirely unsurprised if there was a language where the word for blue was literally "sky colored" quote:blue (adj.1)
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Jul 28, 2022 17:33
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Lmao
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Jul 28, 2022 17:36
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Yeah at least one of the studied abroriginal languages that 'doesn't have a word for green or blue' in actual practice has people who just say leaf colored or sky colored
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Jul 28, 2022 17:39
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skasion posted:Ancient Greeks weren't color blind in the sense that they had problems with their cone cells (as far as we can tell anyway, when was the last time you saw an ancient Greek's cone cells?). Rather, their language supported metaphorical constructions about visual appearances that seem to us strange, and aren't always evidently based on color as we experience it. 'Wine-looking' makes perfect sense to me in the context of white wine tbh
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Jul 28, 2022 18:20
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Personally i love when people try to argue about colors from Homer, who was (a) a poet and (b) blind.
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Jul 28, 2022 18:28
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Tunicate posted:Personally i love when people try to argue about colors from Homer, who was (a) a poet and (b) blind. Cant prove either of these tbf
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Jul 28, 2022 18:28
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The amount of time wasted arguing about Greek color vision because a guy used an evocative, poetic term instead of an accurate one while writing literature will never stop being funny to me.
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Jul 28, 2022 18:31
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the ancient greeks actually had compound eyes, like spiders. they only lost this trait when they began intermingling with the rest of the world after alexander
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Jul 28, 2022 18:36
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The greeks weren't conscious and couldn't see blue. Simple as that
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Jul 28, 2022 18:44
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