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

> > Tho, I have a similar view about the calendar.  Get rid of leap years,
> > and just have a 365-day year every year, and don't worry about the slow
> > procession of the seasons.
>
>Ah, now you've gone and got me started on calendar reform.  Foolish,
>foolish man. :) I'd rather see a 364-day calendar, since that's a
>whole number of weeks.  Then we could either ignore the difference
>between the calendar and tropical years, as you suggest, or have
>a leap week every 5 or 6 years to make up the difference.
Calendar reform, what's that?  My Church (Russian Orthodox Church Outside
Russia) is on the Julian Calendar (also called the "Old Calendar.)  I just
got finished reading the Lives of the Saints for September 3rd to my
children before I packed them off to bed a few minutes ago.  The Julian
Calendar lags 13 days behind the Gregorian Calendar due to the leap year
issue.  I read the Lives for September 3rd rather than September 2nd
tonight because in, Orthodox liturgical usage, the day starts at
sundown.  Or shortly after the ninth hour, which is 3 pm, which is the
earliest that Vespers can be said.  But any way you reckon it, (except for
fasting -- the current practice is to fast from midnight to midnight) it's
already tomorrow for me.  The liturgical day may begin in the evening, but
the Hours of the day are numbered starting at 6 am.  Which means that the
6th hour is noon.  We can just all be happy that we have *clocks* today
rather than sundials.  When I was a Latin student, I was told that the
length of a Roman hour varied seasonally...sort of like built-in Daylight
Savings Time, I guess...more organic, though.

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.  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.)

Isidora

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