The Sumerians had a base 60, or something similar, numerical system. Is there anything today that's base 60, or has specific constructs around 12s and 5s and 60?
Not exactly numerical system, but Javanese has a unique way of calling 60 ("suwidak"), 50 ("seket"), and 25 ("selawe") instead of the usual "enem poloh" (six-ten) etc. It has its roots in trading.
I wouldn’t call it “sexagesimal” so much as “a mess”.
It was 12 pence to a shilling but then 20 shilling to a pound.
Below the penny you had the halfpenny and the farthing (which itself had halves, thirds, and quarters at times). Above the penny you had 3p and 6p (and the rare groat at 4p), and above the shilling was the florin (2s), the crown (5s) and the half-crown.
The only actual 60 ratio was crown to penny (and pound to groat i guess) and I don’t think that was much of a consideration.
I wouldn't call it a mess at all, 240 is a highly divisible number which eased commerce based on mental arithmetic a great deal.
You said it yourself, 60 pence to a crown, what's a tenth of a crown? half shilling, easy. Price is 3 and a half crown, paid with a pound. you don't have a half-crown coin, there are a bunch of ways to come up with 30p or 2s6p, the sums are all instant when one is in the habit of it. Let's ignore the guinea!
Decimalization was probably the right call in an age of calculators and computers, same with the metric system, but the old LSD system and imperial units existed for a reason, which is easy divisibility into convenient fractions. Decimal systems get annoying for mental math unless you happen to need tenths or fifths, or the only kind of quartering you need to do is out of 100.
Which nobody considered for a single seconds. Nobody was counting the number of pences in a pound at the time, these were not sensible scalings of values. Instead you had what was essentially 2 different scales: the pence scale (which topped out to the shillings) and the pounds scale (which bottomed out at the shilling)
> You said it yourself, 60 pence to a crown
I also said that it had no actual relevance.
> Decimalization was probably the right call in an age of calculators and computers, same with the metric system, but the old LSD system and imperial units existed for a reason, which is easy divisibility into convenient fractions.
They mostly existed because they were direct offshoots of the carolingian currency system. After all Roman currency had been decimal (or a mix of decimal and binary) before it devolved, and Russia began the movement of re-decimalising currencies.
You can count the value of the old coinage by weighing it, you really think that such a system was an accident?
I mean, I'm familiar with the history so I know 12 of 20 was a deliberate choice, but if you don't want to read into it, ask yourself if that's plausible.
I’m told this system made more sense back in the days where coins made of precious metals were the dominant form of money. The Spanish Dollar was made of silver and had lines on it so that if you needed to make change you could simply cut it.
>“The dollar was divided into "pieces of eight," or "bits," each consisting of one-eighth of a dollar.”
From there it makes sense that if you needed to further subdivide an eighth of a dollar you could get another coin that is worth some fraction of an eighth of a dollar, and so on. But this starts to get a little weird because all of these other coins start using different metals and each of them have their own exchange rate that fluctuates.
In any event a decimalized currency was a big innovation. So much so that we think of anything else as baffling.
While the Spanish 8 reales was commonly cut, it actually didn't have great affordances for it.
There were two common types in the colonial era-- one had the monarch's portrait, and one had two globes between two pillars. Both types featured a coat of arms that if you squinted hard might have some quadrant lines in them, but they'd be raised-- making them harder to use as cut lines.
Aside from cutting the larger coins, Spanish territories also produced a lot of low-denomination silver coins. You can see this reflected in the scarcity of early US quarters; the 2-real coin was legal tender until 1857, so there was less pressure to produce quarters than dimes during the early years of limited mint capacity.
> >“The dollar was divided into "pieces of eight," or "bits," each consisting of one-eighth of a dollar.”
Well, well. So the name... TIL.
FYI I believe it used to be legal in the UK (still is? Is it even possible with modern plastic currency?) to tear a note in half to pay half the value. My brother said he saw it once, used to pay a bus fair, a very long time ago.
The florin was a very late addition to the system (1848) and a very conscious step towards decimalization; the first two major designs said literally "One tenth of a pound" on them. It's surprising there was no obvious pressure to squeeze the half-crown out of circulation to pave the way towards a decimal model.
