Talk:Conversion of units/Archive 2010

Guntha

This is a curious unit - when I first saw the name I thought it would be some sort of derivative of Gunther, as in the surveyor's chain. Instead it appears to be a traditional Indian unit, regularized in the 19th C. by act of Parliament as 1/40 acre, or 121 sq. yd. If we're looking for an official source, the best cite I've been able to find is:

World weights and measures : handbook for statisticians. United Nations. Statistical Office. New York : United Nations, 1966.

but at the moment I don't have access to a copy. Anybody near a larger library that can look this up for us and nail it down? BPMullins | Talk 03:59, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

That would be a more authoritative source than anything I've come across. I suppose the next question would be: Guntha isn't the only Indian unit of measure. Should we include the others? BW95 (talk) 22:02, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

I've added the UN cite to the Guntha article and removed the cite tag again. That seems as authoritative as we're likely to get. By the date of the UN publication I've cited, India had apparently made all non-metric measures illegal. They persisted in Pakistan long enough to be recorded by the UN. I added some other measures of area to Guntha, but I don't think we want to add all of them to this article. They'd be more appropriate for an article on the history of measure. -- BPMullins | Talk 19:21, 9 July 2010 (UTC)