Dear Roger, This is a more public expression of enthusiasm for your Ottoman Sundial. I very much enjoyed looking at your PowerPoint via...
http://www.walkingshadow.info/Ottoman.html The dial looks splendid and I don't think the re-orientation is a distraction. I have some comments on the write-up. It reminds me of the time I was in Venice trying to buy a train ticket to Munich. I didn't know the Italian for Munich so I tried the German München. The ticket man then asked me whether I wanted to go to Monaco. Well I didn't, but that is where he insisted I had to go. Education is a painful process and that is how I learnt the Italian for Munich. Why do I tell you this? Well, notwithstanding my enthusiasm for all things Italian, I am doubtful about referring to "Italian Hours" in any description of your Ottoman dial. Although every reader of this list knows what Italian Hours are, there are very few people outside the dialling community who do. I was amazed to discover that none of my Italian colleagues had ever heard the term. Since the typical reader of your documentation will be a dialling virgin you are educating from scratch. Given that this dial directly echos Turkish Islamic culture, why not stick with the Turkish and call it Ezanic Time? You can copy Gianni Ferrari's explanation of 17 June and say that the Ezan is the call to prayer at sunset and marks the start of a new day of 24 equal hours (though, in general, not quite the same length as the hour we are accustomed to) split into two lots of 12. I would leave any mention of Italian Hours to a footnote in tiny writing purely for the benefit of diallists. Incidentally, I don't believe that anyone in Italy actually lives by Italian Hours today but there are certainly communities that do and they don't call them Italian Hours! There are 20 monasteries on Mount Athos in Greece that ALL use this scheme but they call it Byzantine time. See: http://www.diatheke.org/Athos/index.php?content1=Monastic%20life/time [For completeness, two of the monasteries there have tried other time systems but both have reverted back to Byzantine time. One of these two, Iveron, used the scheme where the day starts at sunrise. They called this "Chaldean time" (and not Babylonian time). Of course, a Chaldean is an inhabitant of Babylon so I may be nit-picking.] I am now left wondering... Given the choice of Ezanic, Byzantine and Italian, why is it that the last has come to dominate, at least in the dialling community? I find all this as confusing as "Canadian Cheddar" but I won't go down that path! Best wishes, Frank --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
