Time to call time on the timekeeping post?

At 2:39 pm -0400 2/10/98, J.A. Mills wrote:
.......
>I appreciate the lengthy response to my post,
Thanks  :)

>although frankly I believe that
>your criticism of a single line at a time detracts from your argument as a
>whole.
Seemed to me like different arguments to rebut  ;)

>Quite a few of your rebuttals didn't mesh with my own experience, for
>example when you said that most of the world uses the 1997-style calendar.
>Granted they do, but in many a culture the Western calendar coexists with
>another timekeeping system.  Most of the important festivals in China are
>based on the lunar calendar.  Japan keeps records (for taxes and other things)
>based on the current emperor.  The muslim festival of Ramadan floats around
>every year.  These things exist side by side.
You mean like in south west London where I work?  We sure know when Ramadan
comes around each year & when Eid-al-fitr occurs.  We are very aware when
the Chinese New Year starts.  And the night skys are lit up in late autumn
with fireworks as both Sikhs and Hindus celebrate Diwali. Yep - they all
co-exist and run happily according to their different calendars and nobody
has yet uttered a single complaint that official dates are given in the UK
in the Gregorian calendar.

[....]
>
>Your argument en totale seems strikingly similar to the reasons why most
>Americans are reluctant to accept the metric system, i.e. change is bad.
Utterly false.  The American system of weights and measures neither have
4000 years of tradition behind them, nor are they widely used across the
globe.

And if you care to read carefully - I *NEVER* said change is bad.  Indeed,
I have indicated one modest calendar _reform_ that seems sensible to me;
and I'd be quite happy with metric division of the day.  I just think it's
implementation is impractical, not bad.

Whereas, the experience of my own country & of many other countries around
the world strongly suggests that there'd be nothing impractical about the
citizens of the USA & Canada adopting metric weights & measures.

.....
>
>All said, though, I _do_ like your system of nomenclature.  I imagine the
>effects on the language:  "Shoppers!  Only two more kilodays until Christmas."
"2000 days, umm - quite a little way to go - and I wonder what season it
will fall in this time?"

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And at 4:15 pm -0400 2/10/98, Nik Taylor wrote:
>J.A. Mills wrote:
>> I beg to differ:  practicality is a suitable response for why such a
>>system is
>> not being _used_, not why such a system doesn't _exist_.
>
>Ah!  Well, such systems *have* been proposed, but they've never been
>accepted.  So, they do exist, they're just not used.
EXACTLY - they do.

All I & one or two others have _tried_ to do is to suggest why they are not
used.

But surely there must also exist at least one mailing list which _is_
concerned with just such issues?  I thought CONLANG was something to do
with constructing _languages_, or have I misunderstood something.

Ray.