Re: Telling time (wasRe: The English/French counting system (WAS:number systems fromconlangs))

On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 12:38:42PM -0400, Isidora Zamora wrote:
> Well, there are several reasons for the Eastern Churches.  One is that
> there is an ancient concilliar canon (sorry I can't give the citation)
> stating that Pascha (Easter) must fall *after* the Jewish
> Passover.  Adherence to this canon nixes the use of the Gregorian calendar
> (and any associated reforms) for the reckoning the date of Pascha for
> Orthodox.
The Easter calculations post-Gregorian reform are also designed to minimize
occasions where Easter falls on Passover.  The reason Easter must fall after
Passover is the tradition that the Last Supper was actually a Passover Seder.
Obviously, therefore, the Crucifixion came after Passover.  The goal has
always been to keep the anniversary of the Crucifixion as accurate as
possible given that we don't have an actual date.  The complexity comes
from the fact that the closest thing to a date we have is in the
Hebrew calendar, which is lunisolar, while the Julian calendar is
purely solar.  So simply assigning a Julian date wouldn't work, but neither
did the early Christians want to be dependent upon the calendar of the
Jews.  So what we have in the Easter calculations is effectively
a separate lunisolar calendar used to approximate the results of the
Hebrew calendar without actually using it.


> (BTW, I have been told that the Church Fathers who agreed upon
> the calculations for the date of Pascha were aware that the Julian calendar
> was not *complely* precise -- and that it didn't matter to them.)
No reason for it to matter - as long as their rules keep Pascha in the
spring.  Once it starts slipping into summer, their descendants may
reconsider. :)


> Another reason not to do it according to precise astronomical observation
> instead of basing the dates on calendars, as you recommended above, is that
> the Eastern Orthodox Churches are at all times in the midst of an
> incredibly intricate liturgical cycle that *exactly* repeats itself only
> every 532 years.  (532=19x29, and the period of 532 years is called the
> Great Indiction.
It's 19x28, not 29.  19 is the Metonic cycle I mentioned earlier;
the 28-year "solar cycle" is the number of years it takes for the
pattern of days of the week to repeat itself in the Julian calendar,
itself the product of 7 (the number of days in the week) and 4 (the
number of years in a leap-year cycle).  Because of the every-fourth-century
year rule, the Gregorian analogue of the solar cycle is 400 years rather
than 28 (fortunately, 400 Gregorian years  is 146,097 days, which is already
a multiple of 7 and therefore an even number of weeks).  That would
already make the Gregorian Great Indiction 19 x 400 = 7,600 years; but
because the lunar calculations were also refined, the actual number is
far larger (I don't recall what it is, but I seem to remember that it's
in the millions of years, or at least hundreds of thousands).  The
Gregorian calculations may be more accurate on both the lunar and solar
side, but that accuracy comes at the cost of simplicity.

> I have never yet learned why the Orthodox liturgical year
> begins in September.
It's a continuation of the Jewish tradition that the year
begins with the fall harvest; it's the same reason that
the Jewish New Year is celebrated, and the year number changed,
on Tishri 1 in the fall, even though Tishri is counted as
the 7th month of the Jewish year.

> centuries ago, the Western New Year used to begin on March 25, whch makes
> *perfect* sense: it's Annunciation.
So chosen because it's 9 months before Christmas, of course, and
therefore is what would have been Jesus' conception date if he had
been conceived the normal way.  The date of Christmas, in turn,
was chosen to correspond with the winter solstice festival, to
give Christians something to celebrate while their pagan neighbors
were having fun; we have no way of knowing on what date Jesus was
actually born, but the accounts we have make a spring date more
likely than a winter one.  And the winter solstice festival was on
the 25th because that was the original date on which the equinoxes
and solstices were supposed to fall according to the Julian calendar.
The calendar's innaccuracy was such that  the actual astronomical
events were falling on the 21st by the time of the Council of Nicea,
so that became the official Church-sanctioned vernal equinox, and
that was the date that Pope Gregory's 10-day jump was supposed
to correct back to.  However, it actually undercorrected; the
spring equinox falls on March 20th more often than the 21st in the
Gregorian calendar.

Note, however, that even when March 25th was the start of the year according
to the number in England, January 1st was celebrated as New Year's Day.
At least they coincide these days. :)

> With all of this going on, it is not possible simply to reckon
> the date of Pascha according to strict astromical observations: it would
> completely break the flow of things and we'd be hopelessly confused.
The Catholics use much the same system, and the counting isn't quite
as interconnected as you make it out to be.  The important thing is
that you know when Easter/Pascha is so you can count down to and up
from it.  That works equally well with astronimical calculations
in lieu of the traditional ones.  A proposal to unify the Eastern
and Western churches in the observation of Easter by going to an
astronomical basis came very close to passing both councils a few
years ago, in fact.  It would have gone into effect in 2001, the
start of the new millennium and a year in which both traditional
methods yielded the same date for Easter.  But apparently the time
was not yet right; we're still hewing to Kepler, who observed that
"Easter is a feast, not a planet."

:)

-Mark

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