watching ENOLA HOLMES with @cearo_thyme got me thinking I have no fuckin clue what the difference between a Marquis and a Marquess is, or in what if any contexts other than RHCP songs the word is pronounced "mahr-KEE"
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @cearo_thyme
Trust the British to make a complicated peerage chart with two nigh identical ranks. It's like if we had President and Presidente
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They don't, it's a marquess in Britain and a marquis in France
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
ok but no, this is *bizarre* - according to Wikipedia, almost *every single* European language [except German, but including French] has words cognate to both margrave and marquis, which it doesn't seem like correspond to two distinct ranks.
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Replying to @Random832 @loudpenitent and
Hmm? Marquess and marquis are literally the same thing spelled differently Do you mean the masculine and feminine forms? Because in English "marquess" is male and "marchioness" is female, in French the male is "marquis" and the female is "marquise"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
I mean a large number of European languages have a "margrave" equivalent and a "marquis/marquess" equivalent, e.g. Italian margravio / marchese
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Replying to @Random832 @loudpenitent and
Ah okay Apparently that's a legacy of the Holy Roman Empire - it was a title given out by the HRE and therefore people who held it had a greater degree of sovereignty than people appointed as a marquis by a local king
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Random832 and
Another fun fact is that the title "grave" for "count" in France was a homonym for "grave" meaning "heavy" or "weight" The original basic metric unit of weight was the grave, the weight of one liter of water, with one thousandth of a grave called a gram
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But after the French Revolution the anti-aristocracy sentiment was so intense that the name "grave" was considered unacceptable, so it was renamed a "kilogram" This is why today we have the awkward fact that the official base unit of mass in SI is called the "kilogram"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
why not just call it the liter? the imperial system does just fine with pound as a unit of force and mass, after all.
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Replying to @Random832 @loudpenitent and
"Kilogram" minimizes confusion over what you're talking about even if it does seem perverse, as opposed to making "liter" mean two things and adding confusion
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