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

Isidora Zamora wrote:
> Your sugestion of a leap week every 5 or 6 years, may have just provided me
> with the solution to a con-calendar problem of my own.  One of my
> concultures (the same one that has the syllabic consonants) reckons time on
> a strict lunar calendar, 13 months to the year.  I've been wondering what I
> was going to do with that one-day discrepancy every year.  It accumulates
> fast.
13 lunar months is considerably longer than a solar year, while 12 lunar
months are shorter than a solar year.  A strict lunar calendar is a
couple of weeks off of a solar year.

One of my concultures' calendars has a leap week system as well.  Their
year works out to almost exactly 378-10/27 of their days.  An
exceedingly accurate calendar can be devised by making every third year,
plus years following multiples of 27, a leap year.  (Or, alternately,
making multiples of 27 a "double leap" year)  However, they used a
system alternating 375 and 380, having a 5-day week.

> Now it has occurred to me that they could perhaps have a leap month
> every twenty-eight years.  (They'd also need a further leap month about
> every 112 years to take care of the solar calendar discrepency -- if they
> don't want the months to start drifting into entirely the wrong seasons
> over the centuries, that is.  And even done every 112 years, the calendar
> will still drift over a millennium or so, because one leap day every 4th
> year no matter what is, I believe, the Julian method of calculation, and,
> as I said above, the Julian calendar is now 13 days behind the more
> precisely calculated Gregorian that we use today.)
Eh, losing a day every century or so is no big loss in my opinion.  The
Gregorian calendar is far too complex for the minor advantage it has
over Julian, IMO.  They should've stayed with Julian.

In a conromance language I experimented with at one point, I gave them a
calendar reform similar to the Gregorian, except without the 400-year
rule.

One proposal that had been made to Gregory was making multiples of 128
the exception.  That's marginally closer to the tropical year, but is
also a bit more complicated.  :-)

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