Conlang calendars (was Re: Timekeeping)

Herman Miller wrote:
> I actually plan to celebrate three times: first, the beginning of the new
> Jarrda Millennium on December 21, 1999; second, the first day of the new
> decade on January 1, 2000; and finally, the first day of the new millennium
> of the traditional calendar, January 1, 2001.
>
> (For those who aren't familiar with it, the Jarrda Calendar is described at
> http://www.io.com/~hmiller/Jarda/calendar.html)
I've just created the calendar for Watya'iya`isa.  W. is spoken on
another planet, so it's based on different measurements than ours.  This
took me a few hours to work out.  If you're interested, the day is 27
hours, 19 minutes, and 42.3 seconds; the year is 407 days, 19 hours, 55
minutes, and 4 seconds (Earth time).

The calendar is a lunisolar calendar with 16/17 months.  In the oldest
(and by far simplest) of the systems in use is the 5-year calendar.  In
every 5-year period, the second and fourth years are 17 months and the
first, third, and fifth are 16 months.  In addition, every 75th cycle
(375 years) has only one 17-month year (the third year).  The months
themselves are 22/21 days.  In short years (16-month years), the first,
ninth, and sixteenth months are 21 days; in long years (17-month years),
the first and ninth months are 21 days.  All other months are 22 days
long.  However, in the 12th cycle, the first short year has only two
short months (1st and 9th).

In addition, there are three newer calendars in use by different
descendant-tribes.  Five is considered an unlucky number, so there was a
push to abandon the five-year calendar.  The three others are:

3-Year A: 16-16-17, with the fifth cycle 17-16-17 (they couldn't
completely avoid the number five)
3-Year B: 16-17-16, with the fifth cycle 17-16-17
6-Year, the most complicated (also, the one that stays closest to the
five-year calendar): 16-17-16-16-17-16 followed by 16-17-16-17-16-17,
these are repeated, followed by another 16-17-16-16-17-16 period
(30-year cycle overall).

3-Year A is the furthest off from 5-Year, 2 out of every 3 years are one
month behind (there have been proposals to add one month, making it one
month ahead 1 out of every 3 years), the other 1 out of every three is
even with the 5-Year calendar.

All three of these keep the same method of determining the length of
days.  Also, all three keep the longer 375-year cycle, thus the 125th
cycle of 3-Year A is 16-16-17, and of 3-Year B is 16-17-16; the six-year
calendar also drops a month ever 375 years.

Some have instead adopted a solar calendar of 358 days (10 months of 22
days, 6 months of 23 days), with a leap year every 6 years, unless
divisible by 120.

The humans use a 12-month calendar with 11 months of 30 days, and 1 of
28 (February, by tradition, also the month of the leap year).  As soon
as I work out names for the months of Watya'iya`isa, I'll post them.

--
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