Re: Conlang Calendars (was: I Should've Been Asleep Two Hours Ago...)

Mark P. Line wrote:
> David went:
> >
> > Imbedded in this e-mail, of course, is a possible thread about conlang
> > calendars.  I whole-
> > heartedly encourage such a thread.
Apropos of this, I want to hand out a pointer to my Hellenic
Reconstruction group's calender project HMEPA (Hellenic Month
Established Per Athens; but the Latin acronym seems to spell out
the Greek word for 'day')

  http://www.numachi.com/~ccount/hmepa/

This is a sort of a modern idealized calendar based on the Athenal
Clasical one; a month consists of three 'weeks' of ten days, reset
when the first crescent was seen by the appropriate priest. The
days of the week were originally numbered so the first and second
week counted up but the last week counted down. An interesting
contrast to the way modern Americans think of time: in America, we
commonly shift the celebration of holidays to more convenient times
(say, so they give us long weekends); but in Athens, the dates of
the holidays were carved in stone (literally, in big boustrephedon
on the wall of the temple); so if a festival, say Delphinia was
scheduled for the 6th of the month, but could not conveniently take
place, they delayed the 6th, scheduling two or three '5th of
Mounukhion's until things could work out.

So, an idea and an example, and don't feel you have to stick with
'scientific' notions of time.

	Erich