Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Programming a calendar system

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Friday, April 30, 2004, 12:10
On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 10:36:20AM +0100, Michael Poxon wrote:
> I can't see how a week could be based on the number of planets visible, > since this is constantly changing.
Not number of planets visible, number of visible planets. Total, that you can ever see over the course of a year. And with the naked eye, of course, since this was long before telescopes. Also, it's "planet" in its original sense - from the Greek word for "wanderer", it means "celestial object that moves", and the Sun and Moon were included in the list. The other five planets that you can see without aid are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Thus, we have Sun's day, Moon's day, Woden's day (after the Norse "equivalent" of Mercury), Thor's day (after the Norse "equivalent" of Jupiter), Freya's day (after the Norse "equivalent" of Venus), and Saturn's Day. I never said that there was any *natural* correspondence between the number of planets and the number of days in the week. It's completely arbitrary. Just that in the case of our 7-day week it happens to go back to a tradition of putting the days (actually, originally the hours) into a cycle according to which the gods (i.e. planets) took turns watching over us. The Babylonians first made this connection. The Jews picked it up from them during their time in exile and incorporated it into their Creation story and Sabbath tradition. (Those who insist that everything in the Bible be taken literally will dispute this, of course, and say that the seven-day week was ordained by God as one of the ten commandments based on how long it took Him to create the universe. That's fine, too - it's still arbitrary; it's just God making the arbitrary choice. But you might expect that He would do something similar on your conplanet, so take that into account if that's your belief.) -Mark

Replies

Adam Walker <carrajena@...>
Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>