[Dragaera] A Teckla thought

[Alexx Kay]

A Dragaeran year is made up of 17 months of 17 days (possibly plus some
not-yet-documented calendar catch-up games, such as our Leap Year). 
Without any such days, and assuming that the the Dragaeran 'second' is
exactly the same as ours, then their year works out to be slightly shorter
than ours, but by less than 1%.

> If I may stick in an oar - do we know how long a year is?  Because we
> know that the days are longer and that may skew the results. If a year
> is 400 days and a day is 30 hours... an age of 70 suddenly becomes
> much more impressive.
>
> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 12:28 AM, Mark Mandel <cracksandshards at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Doing very occasional catch-up:
>>
>> What I _haven't_ seen in this thread is ... well, anything like this
>> list of
>> textev age comparisons that is in my "to be developed and posted on
>> Cracks
>> and Shards" file: mentions of the age of a Dragaeran that occur with
>> either
>>  - a verbal evaluation of that age
>>  - or an equivalent age for an Easterner:
>>
>> (modified 2002-12-10)
>>
>>   - 100 ~ = "tender age" Yen64
>>   - 200 = young  FHYA86
>>   - 300 ~ "young kid" (yg ad) Yen54
>>   - 300 -400= mid-20's Yen63
>>   - 400 = "young" FHYA3
>>   - 800 -1000 = 35-40 Jrg30
>>   - 1000 ~ = middle age Yen29
>>   - 1500 - , "pushing 1500" = "a bit old" Tek2
>>   - 2000 + "old" Drg48
>>   - 2000 - 3000 lifespan  Jrg 53
>>   - 2000 - 3000 lifespan = 50-68 Yen6
>>   - 3000 - "getting close to 3k" = "old" Drg127
>>
>> Page numbers refer to the editions specified under A note on page
>> numbers<http://www.Cracksandshards.com/books.html#page_numbers>
>> .
>>
>> The date tells us that I compiled this list before *Dzur*, *Jhegaala*,
>> *Lord
>> of Castle Black*, and *Sethra Lavode* were published, so it doesn't
>> include
>> any data points they may offer; and that was the month when *The Paths
>> of
>> the Dead* came out, so I may or may not have checked it. But I may have
>> only
>> looked in the four books actually cited here: *Jhereg, Yendi, Five
>> Hundred
>> Years After, *and *Dragon.*
>>
>> Anecdotes and statistics about people reaching 80 or 90 or 101 (like my
>> wife's great-grandmother) *in our world* are not relevant to Vlad's, or
>> any
>> other Easterner's or Dragaeran's, sense of "how old" an Easterner or
>> Dragaeran is at any particular age, beyond Easterner childhood. We are
>> told
>> that Noish-pa's 70 years is "a *very* impressive age" for an Easterner
>> [*Yen
>> * 206]; remember that most Easterners in the Empire live in poverty,
>> which
>> shortens lifespan (Cracks and Shards : Time : The
>> Clock<http://www.cracksandshards.com/time.html#clock>,
>> para. 6). So it seems not unreasonable to infer that Easterners
>> generally
>> have a maximum expected lifespan of 80 years, though few may reach it
>> and a
>> very few surpass it.
>>
>> On Cracks and Shards, under differences between Dragaerans and
>> Easterners<http://www.cracksandshards.com/peoples.html#DvsE>,
>> I state without a reference that Dragaerans live 50 times as long as
>> Easterners. I don't remember where I found it, but that's the proportion
>> between Dragaeran 4000 and Easterner 80.
>>
>> (WRT 1776: It would be very like Steve to throw in that kind of an
>> Easter
>> egg.)
>>
>> Mark A. Mandel, proprietor, Cracks and Shards
>> http://www.cracksandshards.com
>> a Steven Brust fan website
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Alexx Kay <alexx at panix.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Dragaeran life expectancy seems to be about 4,000 years, though many
>>> die
>>> younger due to accident or illness.  Teckla probably are more subject
>>> to
>>> accident and illness than the other houses, but there's no reason to
>>> think
>>> they can't live as long if they avoid these problems.  In a city the
>>> size
>>> of Adrilankha, one would expect to find more than a few individual
>>> Teckla
>>> who had survived past 2,500 years.
>>>
>>> In recent Timeline work, my best guess for the concluding date of the
>>> most
>>> recent Teckla Republic is 1775* years before the Interregnum, which is
>>> itself about 500 years before the "present" of the Vlad books.  This
>>> implies that there are still some living Teckla who remember life in
>>> the
>>> Republic.  There might even be a few surviving Teckla old enough to
>>> remember the beginning of that Republic.  I wonder what they think of
>>> groups like Kelly's?
>>>
>>> * Did they sign a declaration of independence in 1776?  :-)  [Yes, I
>>> know
>>> they wouldn't have referred to the date in those terms; I was just
>>> struck
>>> by the synchronicity.]
>>>
>>> Alexx
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Mark A. Mandel, proprietor, Cracks and Shards
>> http://www.cracksandshards.com
>> a Steven Brust fan website
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>