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I’ve mostly killed imperial (well, US Customary) wolf by living outside of freedom-unit-land. Not so much intentionally, but my brain doesn’t like miles and the like anymore. I do wish a third of a meter had a standardized nickname because ‘about a foot’ (about 30cm) is something people use all the time (including those that have never known the imperial/us customary system).
“A foot” is simply not a thing outside of English-speaking world as far as measurements do. Even for the actual foot measurement, there are different shoe sizes.
Yes, in Ukraine we just say ‘thirty centimeters’, or ‘three hundred millimeters’ if you want to sound properly pedantic. We have shortcut words like ‘half-meter’, but ‘third-meter’ just sound weird and forced, you would just say ‘33 centimeters’. And decimeters is not used anywhere except for some technical slang like ‘decimeter antenna’, and even then they usually clarify the actual wavelength in centimeters. The centimeter is also easy to visualize, it’s the thickness of your finger.
Also, common calipers only measure up to 150 millimeters, and tape measure is usually 3 or 5 meters. There are not a whole lot of things that are foot-length, it’s usually either below 10 cm or above 1 meter, if you measure floor area or furniture.
about a foot
“Three decimeters” :)
“A school ruler”
Only works if your school had 30cm rulers as a standard but that appears to be true for many people i know.
“It’s about a threci”
Unfortunately that’s super not pronounceable in Japanese. Maybe Trici (though Japanese also doesn’t have ‘si’ and it would end up ‘shi’)? Triki?
I’m not sure why we suddenly decided Japanese was important, but I’m here for it. “Tr” isn’t super pronounceable in Japanese either. Would some form of “San” be used in place of three or tri?
Edit: Google translated “three decimeters” as “surī deshi mētoru”, so perhaps not…
I live in Japan so it’s on my mind. Tri would end up like ‘tori’ or ‘turi’ though a lot of speakers might reduce the o a bit in the former and the ‘u’ might devoice in the latter being closer to “t’ri”. “Triple” is a word that is used (mostly for baseball, I think) and some people do reduce the inserted vowel quite a lot.
I wouldn’t use ‘san’ because it doesn’t make sense outside of Japan (and, I suppose, close enough for Sinitic languages and those with loans from it). I went with ‘tri’ since it’s already a root meaning three (from Greek I think? I never remember which are Greek vs Latin).
I live in Japan so it’s on my mind
Cool! Do you follow Japanese spaceflight at all? Looks like there’s an H-IIA launch out of Tanegashima scheduled for later this week.
Tri would end up like ‘tori’ or ‘turi’
Doesn’t that mean chicken or bird or something? I must admit most of my Japanese knowledge is food-related… (^_^)
“Triple” is a word that is used (mostly for baseball, I think)
Huh, interesting. How do people handle the “ple”? Is it expanded to “poru” or reduced to “pa”?
Cool! Do you follow Japanese spaceflight at all?
Not really. I tried interviewing as a dev on a satellite company’s site, but apparently they require that one be a citizen for various reasons. I did want to go see a launch when I first moved to Japan, but it worked out to be rather difficult and doubly so as I had no driving license at the time. I might have to look into it again as that would be pretty neat.
Doesn’t that mean chicken or bird or something? I
tori does mean bird, yes :)
How do people handle the “ple”?
プリーズ (pu ri (long vowel marker) zu). Final ‘u’ gets devoiced in most cases and, anecdotally, many who say the word a lot devoice the first one as well. So pureez with the quality of the u varying from non-existent to schwa to normal (kinda like oo in moon but shorter)
Well, about 30 centimeters works, too, but neither rolls off the tongue particularly well, heh.
“3 decimeters” has one fewer syllable though. “One banana” is also close, and quite fun.
We call it a Rocco and the official international prototype was made in Italy.
You got to feed the customary wolf some bananas for scale. It just lacks the potassium.
This makes me happy because while I’m a colossal screwup in every imaginable way, I still didn’t crash a multibillion spacecraft due to something that could’ve been checked and resolved with a checklist and a 2 minute confirmation.
Too bad about the lost tech & research though.
