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Imagine we did not have names for months and days. Would you call the tenth month October or December? It does not make sense. Then, the other months at the sta

Imagine we did not have names for months and days. Would you call the tenth month October or December? It does not make sense. Then, the other months at the start of the calendar, would you name them after phases of a military campaign of preparation for war, conquering, looting and pillaging? Would that be deemed politically correct? On the weekday names we are not doing any better. Tuesday - named after the god of war? Doesn't make sense to me. As for the lengths of the months, imagine if you were trying to make the case for the different lengths of months and you were trying to get buy in from your friends in accounts. Surely they would want equal amounts of days in each quarter? Imagine trying to persuade them that different lengths were better, what plausible possible reason could there be? We learn the names of days and months by rote at a very young age. We get encultured into accepting the status quo and never questioning little details - nobody asks at school why 'Dec'-ember is month twelve.

nonbel 8y ago
>"Then, the other months at the start of the calendar, would you name them after phases of a military campaign of preparation for war, conquering, looting and pillaging?" Do you have a reference for this? Besides Mars how are the others related? And also that would make a lot of sense to name periods of time after what you are doing during that time. Edit: Also, I remember reading that the one thing the pharaohs of ancient egypt had to pledge before taking power was not to change the calendar again. Since changing it according to whatever current whims caused even more chaos. At some point the "deep state" of the time just wouldn't stand for it anymore. Edit2: Found the ref. Actually I mentioned it here a few years ago: "It must have been, then, that there were local attempts to retain the coincidences between the true and the calendar year — intercalation of days or even of months being introduced, now in one place, now in another ; and these attempts, of course, would make confusion worse confounded^ as the months might vary with tlie district, and not with the time of year. That this is what really happened is, no doubt, tlie origin of the stringent oath required of the Pharaohs in after times, to which I shall subsequently refer. [...] When the year of 365 days was established, it was evidently imagined that finality had been reached ; and, mindful of the confusion which, as we have shown, must have resulted from the attempt to keep up a year of 360 days by intercalations, each Egyptian king, on his accession to the throne, bound himself by oath before the priest of Isis, in the temple of Ptah at Memphis, not to intercalate either days or months, but to retain the year of 365 days as established by the Antiqui.^ The text of the Latin translation preserved by Nigidius Figulus cannot be accurately restored; only thus much can be seen with certainty. To retain this year of 365 days, then, became the first law for the king, and, indeed, the Pharaohs thenceforth throughout the Avhole course of Egyptian history adhered to it, in spite of their being subsequently convinced, as we shall see, of its inadequacy." https://archive.org/stream/dawnastronomyas00lockgoog/dawnastronomyas00lockgoog_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/dawnastronomyas00lockgoog/dawnast... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11017726#11020076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11017726#11020076
gruez 8y ago
simple: call them by their ordinal/cardinal names. that's what east asian calendars do. october is "month ten" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar#Months https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar#Months https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#East_Asian_tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#...
- freeone3000 8y ago
  That's what we did in latin! October is month 8! And then some dude messed it up.
  - Tor3 8y ago
    Yeah, the dude changed the definition of where the new year starts, moving it back two months. It's still arbitrary, it should have been at the (slightly fuzzy) winter solstice..
jcranmer 8y ago
> As for the lengths of the months, imagine if you were trying to make the case for the different lengths of months and you were trying to get buy in from your friends in accounts. Surely they would want equal amounts of days in each quarter? Imagine trying to persuade them that different lengths were better, what plausible possible reason could there be? The year is 365 + epsilon days long. The epsilon means we need to periodically add or remove days to synchronize solar time with the seasonal calendar; in the Gregorian calendar, we sprinkle 97 such days every 400 years. Armed with this complexity, you have several options: 1. Accept that a month is going to need an extra day about once every 4 years. 2. Have the extra day be not part of the regular cyclical rotation (i.e., be intercalated). This is probably even more complex for bookkeeping than option #1. 3. Insert an extra month's worth of days on a longer period of time (this is essentially what lunar calendars do, but the effect of leap days themselves are less noticeable since the lunar month is quite out of whack with the solar calendar). As for months themselves, you run into the problem that 365 and 366 are not amenable for evenly dividing the year into months: their factors are 5×73 and 2×3×61, respectively. 360 is much nicer (2³×3²×5, i.e., is divisible by every number between 2 and 10 but 7); unsurprisingly, a few cultures opted to use 360 as their basis for month divisions. The Mesoamericans used a calendar that was 18 months of 20 days, with 5 extra days that were intercalated. As it turns out, the lunar month is about 29.5 days long, and the moon is a very obvious cyclical timekeeper (much more obvious than keeping track of days than the sun's seasonal positioning changes). Using a lunar month is going to give you a natural 29/30 alternating month period. However, you end up short by around 11 days when you do this. If you sprinkle them around the months, you find yourself naturally having 7 months of 30 days and 5 months of 31 days. In terms of calendrical complexity, no one beats the Mayans. They opted for a calendar that has three different lengths of the year: a ceremonial calendar that counts 13 months of 20 days, a solar calendar that is 18 months of 20 days with a 19th month of 5 days, another calendar for long-term record keeping that counts from an epoch in base-20, except that one digit is base-18 instead (for a "year" of 360 days). On top of this, they have a "week" of 9 days, and they counted the current day of the lunar cycle, the current lunar cycle number, and whether the current lunar cycle was 29 or 30 days long. And there's another 819-day cycle that we still don't know what it corresponds to. Oh, and you count months and days like "January 1, February 2, March 3, ..., December 12, January 13, February 14, July 31, August 1, ..."

nonbel 8y ago

>"Then, the other months at the start of the calendar, would you name them after phases of a military campaign of preparation for war, conquering, looting and pillaging?" Do you have a reference for this? Besides Mars how are the others related? And also that would make a lot of sense to name periods of time after what you are doing during that time. Edit: Also, I remember reading that the one thing the pharaohs of ancient egypt had to pledge before taking power was not to change the calendar again. Since changing it according to whatever current whims caused even more chaos. At some point the "deep state" of the time just wouldn't stand for it anymore. Edit2: Found the ref. Actually I mentioned it here a few years ago: "It must have been, then, that there were local attempts to retain the coincidences between the true and the calendar year — intercalation of days or even of months being introduced, now in one place, now in another ; and these attempts, of course, would make confusion worse confounded^ as the months might vary with tlie district, and not with the time of year. That this is what really happened is, no doubt, tlie origin of the stringent oath required of the Pharaohs in after times, to which I shall subsequently refer. [...] When the year of 365 days was established, it was evidently imagined that finality had been reached ; and, mindful of the confusion which, as we have shown, must have resulted from the attempt to keep up a year of 360 days by intercalations, each Egyptian king, on his accession to the throne, bound himself by oath before the priest of Isis, in the temple of Ptah at Memphis, not to intercalate either days or months, but to retain the year of 365 days as established by the Antiqui.^ The text of the Latin translation preserved by Nigidius Figulus cannot be accurately restored; only thus much can be seen with certainty. To retain this year of 365 days, then, became the first law for the king, and, indeed, the Pharaohs thenceforth throughout the Avhole course of Egyptian history adhered to it, in spite of their being subsequently convinced, as we shall see, of its inadequacy." https://archive.org/stream/dawnastronomyas00lockgoog/dawnastronomyas00lockgoog_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/dawnastronomyas00lockgoog/dawnast... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11017726#11020076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11017726#11020076

gruez 8y ago

simple: call them by their ordinal/cardinal names. that's what east asian calendars do. october is "month ten" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar#Months https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar#Months https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#East_Asian_tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#...

freeone3000 8y ago
That's what we did in latin! October is month 8! And then some dude messed it up.
- Tor3 8y ago
  Yeah, the dude changed the definition of where the new year starts, moving it back two months. It's still arbitrary, it should have been at the (slightly fuzzy) winter solstice..

jcranmer 8y ago

> As for the lengths of the months, imagine if you were trying to make the case for the different lengths of months and you were trying to get buy in from your friends in accounts. Surely they would want equal amounts of days in each quarter? Imagine trying to persuade them that different lengths were better, what plausible possible reason could there be? The year is 365 + epsilon days long. The epsilon means we need to periodically add or remove days to synchronize solar time with the seasonal calendar; in the Gregorian calendar, we sprinkle 97 such days every 400 years. Armed with this complexity, you have several options: 1. Accept that a month is going to need an extra day about once every 4 years. 2. Have the extra day be not part of the regular cyclical rotation (i.e., be intercalated). This is probably even more complex for bookkeeping than option #1. 3. Insert an extra month's worth of days on a longer period of time (this is essentially what lunar calendars do, but the effect of leap days themselves are less noticeable since the lunar month is quite out of whack with the solar calendar). As for months themselves, you run into the problem that 365 and 366 are not amenable for evenly dividing the year into months: their factors are 5×73 and 2×3×61, respectively. 360 is much nicer (2³×3²×5, i.e., is divisible by every number between 2 and 10 but 7); unsurprisingly, a few cultures opted to use 360 as their basis for month divisions. The Mesoamericans used a calendar that was 18 months of 20 days, with 5 extra days that were intercalated. As it turns out, the lunar month is about 29.5 days long, and the moon is a very obvious cyclical timekeeper (much more obvious than keeping track of days than the sun's seasonal positioning changes). Using a lunar month is going to give you a natural 29/30 alternating month period. However, you end up short by around 11 days when you do this. If you sprinkle them around the months, you find yourself naturally having 7 months of 30 days and 5 months of 31 days. In terms of calendrical complexity, no one beats the Mayans. They opted for a calendar that has three different lengths of the year: a ceremonial calendar that counts 13 months of 20 days, a solar calendar that is 18 months of 20 days with a 19th month of 5 days, another calendar for long-term record keeping that counts from an epoch in base-20, except that one digit is base-18 instead (for a "year" of 360 days). On top of this, they have a "week" of 9 days, and they counted the current day of the lunar cycle, the current lunar cycle number, and whether the current lunar cycle was 29 or 30 days long. And there's another 819-day cycle that we still don't know what it corresponds to. Oh, and you count months and days like "January 1, February 2, March 3, ..., December 12, January 13, February 14, July 31, August 1, ..."