!0-day week (WAS: The English/French counting system (WAS: number systemsfromconlangs))

On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 04:04 , Tristan McLeay wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Isidora Zamora wrote:
>
>> Interrupting the week cycle is untenable.  There are too many religious
>> people in the world for whom the weekly cycle is important to their
>> worship, and they could never just add a day to make things come out even
>> at the end of the year.  If that sort of internatioanl standard were
>> adopted, not only would it be a different day of the month for me, but
>> the
>> days of the week would no longer match up between the civil and
>> liturgical
>> calendars.
>
> Was this one of the reasons that the 10-day week of the Revolutionary
> Calendar didn't succeed as well as the rest of metric system?
That was basically it.  One reason the Revolutionaries adopted the 10-day
"week" was to weaken the influence of the Church; and the Church
authorities certainly opposed the change.  Napoleon realized the Church
still had a lot of influence and wanted to get it behind him and so, among
other things, abolished the revolutionary calendar to gain its support.

In any case, the 10-day week doesn't seem to have been popular among the
ordinary working people & peasants who found their working week lengthened
& were quite glad, I believe, to revert to the 7-day week - thus Boney won
even more supporters   :)

And that, I promise, will be my only post on the off-topic threads about
'how
to tell the time', 'spring' and 'fall', calendar reform and, above all, the
date of Easter (of which I could say a few things); for those interested
the
Easter question is _well_ documented on several Internet sources.

Ray
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