Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

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Evidence for this fact is furnished by most languages, which are as a rule without any proper term for day and night together, the circle of 24 hours. In writing English one sadly misses the Swedish dygn, which has exactly the required significance. The German Volltag is an artificial and not very happy compound. The Greeks also formed a learned and rare (though good) compound, νυχθήμερον. The usual method is to make use of a term according to the pars pro toto principle. This principle, which we meet here at the outset and shall come across more and more frequently in the course of the following pages, is of great importance for the development of time-reckoning since it shews how the original time-indication is discontinuously related to a concrete phenomenon, and only slowly and at a later period develops into a continuous numerical unit of time.

To describe the period of 24 hours, regarded as a single unit for purposes of calculation, most modern and also the ancient tongues employ the term that denotes its light part, i. e. ‘day’ etc. Primitive peoples have no term to express this idea and must describe the period by means of expressions equivalent to ‘day and night’, e. g. ‘sun-darkness’ (Malay Archipelago)[2], ‘light and darkness’ (Yukaghir in N. E. Asia)[3]. The day is sometimes described by the concrete phenomenon which it brings, namely the sun. The Bontoc Igorot of north Luzon have the same word for sun as for day, a-qu, and the time is reckoned in suns[4]. The Comanche Indians reckon the days in ‘suns’[5], and in an Indian hieroglyph from the northern shores of Lake Superior the duration of a three days’ journey described is expressed by three circles, i. e. three suns[6]. The western tribe of the Torres Straits reckons time in ‘suns’, i. e. days[7]. We may compare the well-known primitive idea that the sun originates afresh for every new day. The same thing is found in the language of signs. La Billardière in the year 1800 relates of the very low Tasmanians, now long since extinct, that they had some idea of regulating time by the apparent motion of the sun. In order to inform him that they would make a journey in two days, they indicated with their hands the diurnal motion of the sun and expressed the number two by as many of their fingers. This, he asserts, is the only reference that can be found to any knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies[8]. So also according to Homfray the natives of the Andamans describe a day by making a circle with the right arm, i. e. a revolution of the sun. We may compare the indication of the time of day by pointing with the hand to the position of the sun, with which we shall shortly have to deal. It is not improbable that the designation of the day by means of an indication of the course of the sun arose in the first place from the indication of the position of that planet. The same method of expression is found in the classical languages as a poetic or hierarchical archaism[9], and also in medieval Latin. But ἥλιος, sol, is also used to denote the yearly revolution of the sun, i. e. a year, and the year is denoted by φάος, lux. Still more striking and more significant for the discontinuous method of reckoning is the Homeric use of ἠώς, ‘dawn’, instead of day, e. g. “this is the twelfth dawn since I came to Ilion”,[10] “this is the twelfth dawn he lies so”,[11] and elsewhere. Aratus follows the Homeric use[12]. The nature of this pars pro toto reckoning will be further explained in the chapter dealing with the year.