I have been asked, off list, what the sizes of the Doric foot and the dactyl were and their relationship.
I was tempted to reply off the top of my head that a dactyl must be pretty small, since it takes one teradactyl to make just one whole flying reptile*. But I think I have a spelling problem there... And I had no idea how big the people in that part of Greece were, nor their feet... But then I did a little research by googling "Doric foot". Here's what I found on one page at http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Measurements.htm - A dactyl is a "finger" (singular: daktylos; plural : daktyloi), or a digit. - A foot (singular: pous; plural:podes) comprises 16 dactyls. - A Doric foot was 326 mm and an Ionic foot was 296 mm. A generic value for the foot of that region is taken as 309 mm. - Thus a dactyl is roughly 19.3 mm in size, from (309/16) mm. A Doric dactyl then would be about 20.4 mm in size. These of course must be inferred from archaeology since the Doric Institute of Standards is defunct and all of their records lost**. Interestingly, in poetry, a dactyl is a trimeric metrical foot of the form long-short-short. Look at your index finger and you will probably see that the three segments follow that pattern of lengths between the knuckles and the tip. I wonder which "joint" the Doric people used as their model. Or perhaps it was the width; my index fingers' distal joint width is about 20 mm. There is a form of poetry also known as the double dactyl but that's too far off subject to go into. Before I leave this ramble, however, I would like to quote the German author of the page cited above. The author discusses cubits, digits, and palms and then states, "While it may be funny to think that distances were used based on human anatomy we should not forget that the foot is still used in the United States." Sigh..... Jim * Pterodactyl ("wing finger"), more properly a pterosaur, of which at least 60 genera are known, with wing spans from a decimeter to 13 meters, extant 228 - 65 million years ago. http://www.paleodirect.com/ptero1.htm ** but see also http://www.ajaonline.org/archive/104.1/wilson_jones_mark.html http://home.att.net/~philcannon/measures.htm On Friday 2004 August 27 23:36, James Frysinger wrote: > This week the College moved its display of antique scientific instruments > from the library to a lobby in our Science Center. Being the lucky sort, I > got to be the local receiving representative. In preparation I was handed a > sketch that had been drawn up to indicate the planned placement of the > cabinets. I was tickled to see that all the measurements were in meters: > room dimensions, cabinet dimensions, and so forth. > > It turns out that the library "curator" of this equipment (this had been a > part-time duty for him) had made the sketch and he figured that he could do > it in metric units since we would surely understand them. This gent turns > out to be an avid student of archaeo-architecture and he has at least one > published paper on the proportion patterns of Greek and Roman temples. He > gave me a copy of a paper he published in "Architectural History", a > British society journal. The only non-metric units I saw in that paper were > the Doric foot, the dactyl, and the Solonian foot. > > In both his sketch for the new display area and in his paper, Gene Waddell > measured in meters to the nearest centimeter, e.g., 1.73 m, or to the > nearest millimeter as appropriate. (Of course, in this British journal that > is spelt metre.) > > Most of my week was a series of headaches, but the thrill of seeing this > display of scientific instrument artifacts and the joy of seeing a metric > paper in a non-science field, published by a colleague, made the week > superb overall. > > Someday, our foot and inch will seem as arcane and obscure as the Doric > foot and dactyl. > > Jim -- James R. Frysinger Lifetime Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist Senior Member, IEEE http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Office: Physics Lab Manager, Lecturer Dept. of Physics and Astronomy University/College of Charleston 66 George Street Charleston, SC 29424 843.953.7644 (phone) 843.953.4824 (FAX) Home: 10 Captiva Row Charleston, SC 29407 843.225.0805
