Talk:Tide (time)

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—Yamara ✉  21:58, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Tag removed
The Sources tag has been removed. All the information in this article has been derived from sources which have been wiki-linked on this page.Rosser 11:31, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Dubious claims and nonreliable sources removed
Previously, the article claimed that the Saxon tides were named "Morgen", "Daeg-mael", "Mid-daeg", "Ofanverth dagr", "Mid-aften", "Ondverth nott", "Mid-niht", and "Ofanverth nott" and that they began their cycle at the equivalent of 4:30 am and ran every three hours thereafter. First, the sourcing is incredibly weak, with Google providing these names and times from only this article and the two nonscholarly and unreliable self-published websites it was using as sourcing. That's so bad we just need to pull that info. Second, some of these names are obviously correct if badly formatted (middæg) but most are completely unsubstantiated by dictionaries of Old or Middle English or the etymologies of the OED. Third, we obviously need to express these time periods as, e.g., "centered on noon" rather than "running from 10:30 to 1:30" even if they turn out to exist in this format. It doesn't seem like they do, however, with the Middle English Dictionary saying that half undern occurred at the third hour, whole undern at the fourth hour, and high undern at the fourth or fifth hour evenly. It seems more likely from that phrasing that they were thought to run for the even three hours following the time which gave the period its name.

There's obviously a huge mess, though, even apart from the bad/badly sourced info we previously had. "Undern" meant "morning/terce" and "noon" was "3 pm" but somehow they both started being used for midday and then undern switched to dialectical use for the afternoon. It may have something to do with meals or activities that got moved around or changed by the Norman Conquest, but it's not very clear from the MED and needs to be worked out and explained here at some point. — Llywelyn II   04:34, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Delete and redirect
Ok, so having waded through Old English dictionaries, Bede, and other period accounts of astronomy and horology... These things just don't exist.

Tid was nothing more nor less than hour and never intended anything different from the 24 equal Roman hours, the 12 temporal hours of daylight and 12 of night, and the extended sense of the canonical hours.

I had edited the article under the good-faith understanding that this system differed from the canonical hours by unusually extending the periods of 3 equal hours into the night. Both the badly-sourced list of tides here and the completely unsouced list of stounds at Wiktionary (see here), however, seem to be complete balderdash. The Saxons lacked hourglasses and waterclocks. Their night was divided by the ecclesiastics according to when the abbot's guy felt like waking everyone up and by the scholars according to how much noise the animals were making. As far as Bede or any reputable scholar mentions, the divisions of the night were never even theoretically split into 4 sections.

The content here regarding the words belongs in a Name section at Hour; the content about the 'tide dials' belongs at Canonical sundials; the Saxon names of the hours could possibly go at English units under a new Time section. The remaining content about three-hour periods belongs at the Internet Archive as a cautionary tale about "souced" misinformation on Wikipedia. — Llywelyn II   09:09, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Give the above, I've removed Tide (time) from the Template:Time measurement and standards list of units; we can then more clearly see what links here directly. Klbrain (talk) 13:44, 16 March 2017 (UTC)