Yes, I know, I'm evil...I use a custom system of weights and measures and seemingly never give a comparison....
Or DO I?
Go look through Questing Game, you'll find the conversion.
You're close, Shadowhawk.
A span is made up of 10 "fingers," each of which is about 1 inch. It's not exactly 1 inch, but it's close enough to round off.
1 span = 10 inches, with a slight fraction which is ignored.
4 spans to a pace.
2 paces to a stride.
5000 spans to a longspan.
4 longspans to a league.
Because of the wonders of mathematics, it works out that a Sennadar league is exactly 3 miles in the English system.
Of course, me specifically engineering the measurements so they matched to make it easier to accurately measure distances had nothing to do with it....
*whistles innocently*
For those who are curious, the span of measurement dates back to the Urzani domination of the world. It was the span of the hands with fingers spread and pinkies touching of the Crown Princess Urilaeria when she was five years old. It we divided into smaller units which was the average of the space between the tips of her fingers. Originally, there were only 8 fingers to a span because the Urzani only have 8 fingers, but it was changed after the fall of the Urzani Empire to 10 fingers, but the length of a span wasn't altered...just the measure of a finger was shortened to fit 10 into a span.
This is why they're called fingers and spans.
The ORIGINAL system of measure was the length of the rod held by the Emperor/Empress, but it was changed. The original Rod of measurement was approximately 1.5 feet in the English system.
And as a bit of extra trivia, Urilaeria was the 9th generation ancestor of Spyder (her "great x 8 grandmother).
The Sennadar system uses the "stone" as the weight of measure.
1 stone is around 3.5 pounds in the English system. It is further divided into 20 smaller units, called facets.
The original stone is also of Urzani origination. It was the weight of the Imperial Crown. The smaller units were called facets after the 20 gems in the crown. It was originally called a "crown" after the crown, but since stones of exactly similar weight were used outside of Shilarith (the capitol city, which was destroyed and whose ruins now reside in southern Sulasia), it came to be known as a stone of weight.
This concludes today's episode of Useless Facts.
