Real-Life Measurement Units

[Wanara009]

Just a question, is using a real-life measurement unit is damaging for a world-building? It's been bugging me since I use metric system for distance and weight (referred to as 'unit' instead of 'gram').

Thanks.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

In my opinion, it doesn't bother me to read real world measurements in fantasy worlds. Metric or otherwise, I wouldn't be concerned.

The only other alternatives would be to avoid any measurements at all which might weaken what the author is trying to impart -OR- develop names for your world's own system of measurement. I think I'd find that relatively jarring & labor some to read. Furthermore, I'm a firm believer that creating anything that serves the same general purpose as something we all commonly accept, is unnecessary.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

My thought is that you should either be metric or imperial all the way through. Don't mix kilometers with pounds for example. But also I tend to regard imperial as old, so they fit better into traditional fantasy work, and metric as more modern, so it slips easily into sci fi.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Gurkhal]

What I think is important is that the measurements should be reasonable in the society they appear in. If they can measure in grams then they can use gram as a weight measure. But if they lack scales that are accurate enough then they should obviously not use grams alot. That's what I think at least.

And of course, you shouldn't mix things up.

 

[Caged Maiden]

When I measure things, I try to think of how people would measure things, without calibrated tools. So, in one book, I had a woman receive a necklace. Rather than talk about karats, this is how I described it: It was a sapphire the size of a cherry, set in silver, surrounded by topaz.

See, no talk of karats, mm, any of that. I like to use that sort of thing.

I think about it like this, which is better?:

He pulled out his dagger, as long as his forearm... He pulled out his dagger, fourteen inches of steel.....

She entered and cast her gaze about the room, it was large, fully twenty feet to the far wall... She entered and cast her gaze about the room, it was large, twice as big as the bedroom she'd had growing up.....

Forty kilometers, and the only other person he'd seen was a traveling tinker... Two days walking, and the only other person he'd seen was a traveling tinker.....

I am not sure any are wrong or right, but one will probably sound better in the context of the situation for YOU. I say, go with that one

I tend to compare things to other, well-established things, when I measure or describe things. If, however, you have a specific need to measure the exact size of something, say, the wands in Harry Potter or something like that... I'd pick a system you feel most comfortable with. I use inches for that purpose, because I think a reader will simply read the sentence, absorb the information, and not ask a question like, "Wait, did she just say INCHES?" HAHA maybe that's a silly reason.

Best wishes!

 

[VanClash]

I do try and avoid using metres and real-life measurements, but I feel that when the time arises I just use them. Personally, I feel it’s better just to use a term we’re all familiar with them have a chapter dedicated to the measurements used in the world.

 

[Chilari]

I tend to use imperial measurements if a measurement is called for - say if a couple of characters are having a conversation while shopping in the market, one might break off the conversation for a moment to ask for a two pound bag of flour or a twenty foot ball of yarn. In terms of distances, I tend to measure by time, or at a push in imperial measurements ("You can't go to the big city tonight, it's over thrity miles away!") because metric sounds wrong; it's an arbitrary standardised way of measuring that has no meaning for people in a pre-industrial, pre-scientific world. I prefer ways that at least have some basis in natural means of measuring - like how a foot is based on a, well, foot, or a league is based on what can be easily walked in an hour.

It's odd, really, because in general we have no problems with the concept of "hour" or "mile" in a fantasy novel, but once we want to measure wealth, it's all copper/silver/gold or whatever you decide to call it (tinny, stork, sheaf in one of my previous words, where the smallest denomination was made of tin, the second one up had a picture of a bird on and the biggest had a picture of some wheat on). But GBP with its sixpences and shillings and crowns and whatnot would make more sense in that kind of society than 100 copper to a silver, 100 silver to a gold. For that matter, a system where the relationship between gold and silver coinage fluctuated based on the market value of gold and silver would make more sense still in a society where money is quite new - this happened in ancient Greece, for example, and in Rome. In the later empire when coinage was becoming rapidly devalued by creating alloyed coins instead of pure silver coins, value fluctuated massively depending on silver content, because the emperor had to dilute it to have enough coins to pay an increasingly expensive army that was no longer creating wealth through invasion but now a sink for wealth because of how many people needed paying.

 

[Hypervorean]

Well, for me, who has never known anything but the metric system, it is so ingrained (can you say that?) in me, that I don't even think about it when reading it in a book. It doesn't bother me. It does however bother me slightly if someone is using miles or inches or pounds or whatnot to describe exact measures, because I don't know the value of those. I tend to just always ignore them then. When Rowling describes the size of a wand in Harry Potter I can't see it for me, so all the wands look pretty much like the same kind of stick in my head. Maybe that is stupid, but I suspect alot of my fellow Europeans (who are not from England, obviously) might feel the same way.

Of course I could just go and find out the values to those measurements, but even then, when I am not properly familiar with them I would have to sit and convert them into the metric system everytime I read some measurement in a book. And that would really ruin the reading experience for me, so I don't.

Personally I only use measurements sort of abstractly. I might say something like: "they had hundreds of miles yet to put behind them" - that could be 200 or 800, I wouldn't know exactly how long either is, but I do understand that it is a long way either way, which is the point.

 

[Chilari]

I hadn't thought of it like that, Hypervorean. I mean, of course there are people who grew up with the metric system and don't have much of a grasp of imperial measurements because they've never needed to, it just never occurred to me it would present a comprehension issue like that in fantasy. Having learned metric in school and imperial from my parents I can easily convert between them; my mum too can work in both - metric for architectural drawings, imperial for the weight or height of people, and she just mixes it up in cooking (400g flour, quarter of a pink of milk, teaspoon of baking powder, ounce of butter etc). And of course beer and milk in Britain can still be measured in pints, while other alcoholic drinks, soft drinks and petrol are all in litres (working out miles per gallon from a known quantity of petrol in litres isn't fun though). The size of a monitor or TV screen is measured in inches (my brother proudly boasts of his 52 inch TV he just bought with all that disposable income he has from not paying rent or for food because he lives in the pub where he works, selling beer in pints and wine and spirits in millilitres); and while medical staff and people who work in gyms use kg and m when recording someone's weight and height I don't think anyone else I know does.

I'm going to confuse myself in a minute.

So maybe a made up fantasy measurement would be better, or measurements based on patently obvious things, like describing something as an hour's travel away, or a three day journey, or a barrel full of flour.

 

[SeverinR]

Hi,

My thought is that you should either be metric or imperial all the way through. Don't mix kilometers with pounds for example. But also I tend to regard imperial as old, so they fit better into traditional fantasy work, and metric as more modern, so it slips easily into sci fi.

Cheers, Greg.

Units of measure could change with different countries or cultures.
Older units could be used by older societies and newer use more modern.

I think there is units of measure in the resources section to chose from, if I remember correctly.

I started the other unit of measure, and it was in research.
I will post this link in Resources;
http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/custom.html

 

[Mindfire]

You could try out using biblical measurements: shekels, cubits, spans and so forth. But that might get hard to keep track of for both you and the reader unless you include a glossary of terms or something.

 

[krunchee]

I really like the idea of custom measurements. Especially using things like hand, span, pace, league etc. They sound a little more "fantasy" dare I say it.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

There's loads of books that use real-world units, so no, it evidently is not an issue to do so. However using the metric system in a pre-industrial feudalistic world would be weird, since they probably haven't developed the understanding of the value of a precise, universal system of measurement, so it wouldn't make sense that they'd have developed such a thing. (Unless you come up with a good reason why they would have; you can make up the rules, after all.)

 

[Steerpike]

Real-world measurements are fine.

Look, your entire story is presented in English, with people speaking English, in a world where English doesn't exist and has never existed. If someone in the fantasy world uses the equivalent of a 'foot' as a measurement, why would you change it to some other fantasy word rather than just be consistent and present the English equivalent like you are doing throughout every other aspect of the story? Are you going to use made up words for water, rabbit, tree, grass, sky, cow, and so on? Because the English names for those things don't exist in your world, either.

 

[PaulineMRoss]

I don't think it matters much whether you use real-world systems or invent your own as long as it's consistent with the needs of your created world. So your highly disciplined empire will have weights and measures to a similar degree as the modern world (whatever they happen to be called). A slightly ramshackle kingdom might have mileposts along the roads and a few useful measures for trade. Nomadic tribes would measure distance as 'a half-day's ride' or 'twenty paces', and probably wouldn't have much need to weigh anything at all. But I do wonder why so many fantasy worlds still have twenty four hours in the day.

Anyone read 'The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction' by Athans and Salvatore? They have a wonderful section where they take a paragraph written in plain English and gradually, draft by draft, change terms to weird fantasy versions until the whole thing is gobbledygook. The opening lines go from...

Bronwyn stared up at the imposing silhouette of the king's castle. The walls, made of rough-cut granite, were thirty feet tall, and from the shadows at the edge of the Hindrid Forest, she watched as a pair of guards slowly made their night rounds, appearing and disappearing between the battlements.

...to this...

Bronwyn stared up at the imposing silhouette of the imperator general's star citadel. The walls, made of rough-cut karnstone, were twenty-two-and-a-half sixth-hoons tall, and from the shadows at the edge of the Hindrid Forest, she watched as a pair of corrinnions slowly made their night rounds, appearing and disappearing between the battlements.

Point being, of course, that sometimes changing a readily understandable measure may be a sixth-hoon too far.

 

[Feo Takahari]

If someone in the fantasy world uses the equivalent of a 'foot' as a measurement, why would you change it to some other fantasy word rather than just be consistent and present the English equivalent like you are doing throughout every other aspect of the story?

Well, I once recommended changing it when editing someone's fanfic for a certain popular cartoon in which the protagonists have hooves. (The author responded by citing a specific episode that used "feet" as a measurement--which, to me, speaks of lack of care on the part of the scriptwriters.)

 

[wordwalker]

When I measure things, I try to think of how people would measure things, without calibrated tools. So, in one book, I had a woman receive a necklace. Rather than talk about karats, this is how I described it: It was a sapphire the size of a cherry, set in silver, surrounded by topaz.

See, no talk of karats, mm, any of that. I like to use that sort of thing.

I'm a big fan of this, because to me any numbers strike me as a weaker kind of description for measures. One "stone's throw" seems more tangible than guestimating a distance into "twenty paces" or "sixty feet." Sometimes I need units, but I like it when i don't.