Re: Hebrew calendar direction

>From: Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...>
>
> > > Are those literal translations of the names?  I find it quite
> > > surprising that the Islamic calendar, which has absolutely no
> > > seasonal anchors, would have months named after seasons and
> > > weather conditions.  Holy misnomers!
>
>The Islamic calendar is lunar, not solar.  Its seasonal swings are quite
>predictable, though not "ordinary" to anyone using the solar calendar.
If by predictable you mean it shifts either 10 or 11 days back with regards
to solar longitude every year, then yes it is.  Sort of.  Actually, the
phases of the moon aren't entirely predictable even for astronomers, and the
Islamic calendar is ultimately observational, so whether it is 10 or 11 days
is something it is only possible to guess at (with considerable accuracy,
but no certainty).

However, it seems like you mean that the Islamic calendar has leap months,
like the Hebrew or Chinese calendars.  It does not.  The Islamic calendar is
the worlds only lunar calendar.  Those others of the most common type:
lunisolar.  Lunisolar calendars have odd shifts through the seasons, which
are predictable (in the case of the predictive calendars, like the Hebrew)
or nearly so (in the case of the observational calendars, like the Chinese),
but lunisolar calendars do shift back and forth across solar longitude
meaning that any date will be within approximately 15 days of the
"corresponding" Gregorian date on any given year.

The pre-Islamic calendar of the region was lunisolar, though, and that is
where the names come from.  At this point, though, the names are just names,
and they only coincide with nature for a few years every 33 1/2 years, give
or take.

Calendars that aren't in sync with celestial cycles, while rare, are
actually more common that you might think.  The "solar" Mayan calendar is
actually an invarient 365 days, which cycles through the seasons once every
1507 years, almost exactly.  The 20-day "months" have seasonal names which,
like the Islamic names, are usually inaccurate.  And, of course, there is
the 260 Mayan Tz'olkin calendar, which was never intended to represent
either a year or a month, but rather the time between solar transits* over
the homeland of that particular calendar.

Athey

*<soapbox>  Actually, there are a number of competing theories.  This is
simply, in my opinion, by far the most reasonable.  It may seem a little
arbitrary, but in that part of Mesoamerica, the solar transits mark the
beginnings and ends of the rainy season.  This is vitally important to
agriculture, which was being developed at the time the calendar is thought
to have first appeared.  This seems much more plausible to me than notions
like the Tz'olkin representing the human gestation period or the length of 9
lunations, both of which it actually fails to predict accurately.
</soapbox>

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