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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From the investigation of the modes of naming and reckoning the day and its parts it follows for primitive time-reckoning in general that the time-indications refer to concrete phenomena, and therefore either they indicate a point of time or, if they are related to periods, these periods are of different and fluctuating length. They are accordingly of no use in calculating, they cannot simply be added together even when a number of such periods together make up the period of a complete day, i. e. they are fundamentally discontinuous. When several days are to be counted the pars pro toto method is used: instead of the whole day a part is counted. Within the day two phenomena chiefly recur with such unfailing constancy as to be of use in counting: they are the daily reviving sun and the night or sleeping-time. The word for sun is often the same as that for day. Within the day fall a number of occupations which chiefly turn the attention to its length and varying phenomena, and this is the case also with the sun itself, for the varying position of the sun in the heavens affords the most usual mode of indicating the time of day. For the counting a point of time is best suited, or, which comes to the same thing, a unit without subdivisions, a blank period. This is the reason why the counting by ‘sleeps’ or nights predominates. On the same grounds the quite isolated pars pro toto counting of the days from the dawns in Homer may be explained. To indicate the duration of time primitive peoples make use of other means, derived from their daily business, which have nothing to do with time-reckoning; in Madagascar ‘rice-cooking’ often means half an hour, ‘the frying of a locust’ a moment[191]. The Cross River natives say:—‘The man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted’, i. e. less than about 15 minutes; ‘the time in which one can cook a handful of vegetables’, i. e. an hour[192]. The Malays, the Javanese, and the Achenese use the following expressions for a period of time:—a blink of the eyes (literally), the time required for chewing a quid of sirih (about 5 minutes), the time required for cooking a kay of rice (about half an hour), for cooking a gantang of rice (about an hour and a half), half a day, a ‘sun-dark’, i. e. a complete day and night[193]. The natives of New Britain (Bismarck Archipelago) measure the time between sunset and the moon-rise by the smouldering of a torch or the time occupied in cooking yams, taro, or wild taro. Short divisions of time were also expressed by comparative terms, e. g. the throwing of a stick for a short distance, ‘a woman’s crossing’, or the distance a woman would paddle[194]. Very often duration of time is indicated by reference to the time needed to traverse a well-known piece of road between two places. Examples are superfluous. But all these indications of periods of time are found among more developed peoples: the primitive peoples pay little or no attention to them.