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by Insanity·1mo ago·view on hn ↗
Just wait for Hollywood to create a film about Roman mythology and not cast a single Roman!

But less tongue-in-cheek, the other thing is that the legacy of the Romans is pretty much all around us. The Roman Calendar (with July and August both referencing a Roman leader), the Latin alphabet (with the additional letters like 'y' being added later on to support Greek), the roads we can travel, etc.

3 comments
It's not only July and August; January, May, June, and Mars, are named after Roman gods; February and April after Roman rituals; and September to December after Roman numerals (7 to 10th month, as they were when the calendar first started).
Yup exactly :) I named July/August for the connection to real people, but yeah it’s pretty much all around us.
>Mars

While not technically incorrect(?) I'm guessing you meant March?

Maybe they're French and forgot to translate that month (in French March = mars)
Yeah, freudian slip.
Also the weekdays in many Latin derived languages.
Also the vast majority of the rest of the vocabulary in those languages
They're always British in film for some reason
Not in the underrated movie The Eagle! In that one, the soldier from the world's dominant global empire has an American accent, and the actual Briton slave has a British accent.
I should watch that one. Not that surprising since it's a British film. There's also Waterloo which cast English as English, Scottish as Scottish, French as American, and German as idk foreign, plus tons of extras either yelling in French or saying nothing in Russian.
And of course there's Death of Stalin where everybody just uses either their own accent or they're Jason Isaacs who went for over the top Yorkshire.

I love creative accent work in movies. I recently watched Pride and Prejudice, and Donald Sutherland clearly isn't doing an English accent but it works somehow.

Because of the allusion to British Empire?
It's probably because anything set in ancient or medieval times in American film uses British accents. You'll seen it for Rome, Sparta, Macedonia, and even Persia.
Every modern law system has its roots in Roman one.
Also lb for Pounds come directly from Rome

And pre decimalisation. In the UK Pence was shortened to 'd' which I understood to refer to the Roman Dinari.

It's denarii, barbar.
Sorry, Denarii. Barbar seems to refer to Denarii minted by barbarians? but the AI result didn't come up in English?

Ps And don't call me Barbar.

Barbar, likely short for barbarus which in this context likely means foreigner. It can also mean cruel, uncivilized or savage but I'm taking the not-roman approach here.

I'll add "unable to understand context" to my list of frustrations about LLM usage.

> *English Common Law* has entered the chat
Still romanian. "The common law—so named because it was common to all the king's courts across England—originated in the practices of the courts of the English kings in the centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066" [1]

France (and Normandy) was conquered by Rome before it was granted to Rollo, a Viking. A few generations later, his descendant William the Conqueror claimed the English crown. Just like what happened with Gauls and Romans, the conquered people adopted large parts of the language and customs of the conqueror. That's why the English language is ~25% of Roman origin for it's vocabulary. I suppose it is the same for English common law.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#History

After 2000 years everything mixes together at least somewhat so trying to draw hard lines is an exercise in pointless semantics, but it's worth acknowledging that as a system, common law is pretty distinct from the Roman tradition of civil law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
This brings to mind the wonderful Econtalk episode about Bruno Leoni [0]. The beginning of the podcast describes his untimely passing, which almost seems a Cohen brothers movie plot.

  So, we pore over Supreme Court cases on the First Amendment, for example, to 
  try to interpret what tests we will use to determine whether something is 
  going to be unconstitutional law. Leoni didn't want that. He argued that--and 
  again, he was proud of the Roman law contribution. He said that the Roman 
  jurist was a sort of scientist: that the object of his research was a 
  solution to cases that citizens submitted to him for study. So, an 
  industrialist or a scientist might look to a physicist to engineer a 
  technical problem. So, private Roman law was something to be described or 
  discovered, not something to be enacted. So, over time, these principles 
  emerge.
0. https://www.econtalk.org/the-underrated-bruno-leoni-with-mic...
Interesting. As an unhappy user of the court system I have made these same points. Although I linked it back to the enlightenment.

The law should be akin to the scientific method. Unfortunately like science it is full of humans, so reputation is important, etc, etc. unfortunately the judiciary is far worse than the scientific community.