Measurements in the Wild Heritance series
When I was writing the first Wild Heritance book, I made considered decisions about certain aspects of these fantasy lands, especially in the area of measurements. For physical measurements, I chose to use the methods some ancient civilizations used, measurements related to their own bodies, such as the width of a finger and distance of a step. Since people often tend to shorten things, rather than saying something was “as long as his arm” I shortened such measurements to terms like “armlength”, “finger-width”, etc. (Note for “pace”, I took that measurement directly from the ancient Romans.)
But what about the measurement of time? The people of the Six Realms and environs do not use clocks as we know them. Most of their tracking of time is based off things they can all see: the sun and stars. Those are great for rough, larger divisions of time, but less useful for smaller segments for the average person. The use of a marked candle to divide time was known in ancient times and I adopted that for these fantasy lands, shortened to “candle-mark”.
For smaller increments of time, with no clocks more sophisticated than candles, minutes and seconds seemed inappropriate units, especially since these lands have no precursors who had a mathematical system based around the number 60. I wanted to stick with the pattern of observable phenomena as the measurement. But what was something that would be common to the people in these lands that would be a short time but not almost instantaneous, like “the blink of an eye”?
After some research, I learned that an adult takes 12 to 20 breaths per minute. As something that my people could easily have noticed, it seemed reasonable the time to take a breath could be used to mean a short time. Again, going with the idea of shortening terms for common use, instead of saying something like “in the time it took him to take ten breaths”, I named that short, rough measurement a “breath-of-time”.