Posted by Peter Ceresole on September 04, 2003 at 19:40:48 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Denarii = D = Penny posted by Katharine Edgar on September 04, 2003 at 19:27:03:
I'm sure you have the very best traits of Nancy... But as for the Latin grammar I am as the beasts that perish. I passed my 'O' level Latin with one mark to spare and never ventured that way again... At school I became a scientist and totally fell in love with the metric system, which with its lack of fussy and weird numbers meant I could calculate the real world in my head without hardly trying.
However, of course AR used the Imperial system; it was the measure of the imperium, not just of of the red bit of the map, but also of the dominant construction and engineering system.
In reality, by the time he wrote, Germany had totally overtaken Britain in manufacturing, but the dominance of metric took far longer to happen. His children would no more have thought in metric than spoken in Serbo-Croat.
Nowadays, the main contribution of imperial measurements is to miss Mars.