Re: The New Year

In a message dated 12/29/2002 8:24:04 PM Pacific Standard Time,
yonjuuni@EARTHLINK.NET writes:

> James Landau wrote:
> > Where have you decided to start your new years, and in what seasons?
> > The belief that the year should change with winter (or more precisely,
> > ten days from the start of winter) seems arbitrary. Rosh Hashannah
> > occurs in September, the Julian calendar if I recall began on April
> > Fool's Day, and only the other day an episode of "The Simpsons" was on
> > in which Officer Wiggum mentioned he had confiscated some fireworks
> > from some Chinese people who -- get this! -- claimed they were
> > celebrating New Year's in February! If anything, I would think the
> > obvious time to start a new year would be with spring.
>
> Which is where the Chinese New Year is.  :-)  But, they count the
> Equinoxes and Solstices as the MIDPOINTS of the seasons rather than the
> STARTS, thus, all of the longest 91 days of the year are in Summer,
> while the 91 shortest are in Winter.
 So THAT'S why they start it in February. Wouldn't imagine they'd think of
February as spring, but now I can see where it comes from.

  That's how my people do it, too. > Their calendar is lunisolar, with the 2nd
> new moon after the winter solstice being the start of the year (at least in
> principle).
>
> They live on a different planet, which has 3 moons.  They use the middle
> moon for the calendar.  There are about 15 and a quarter cycles of
> phases in the year.  There's no correlation with the Gregorian calendar.
 The middle of three moons . . . that's an interesting way of choosing. How
many Earth days does a year on your conplanet last?

 The people on this list have given me some ideas I hadn't thought about,
which could make the beginning of Kankonia's year anywhere on the calendar
(although I'm starting to lean towards the beginning of spring). I'm also
thinking of giving the ancient people of the continent of Povoi (who had
their own civilization in early times different from that of the people on
Hegheos, enough sophistication to count as a "civilization" -- these people
got involved in a lot of religious movements and had social change) their own
ancient calendar, which in modern Kankonia has the status of the Ancient
Egyptian calendar on Earth. It would be based on Akalla (the closer of the
two moons) and therefore irregularly distributed across the year. I'm
thinking of having them give a name to every day of the month like on the
Mayan calendar as well as names for the months.

> As for subdividing the day, what they talk about when they talk>
> > about na enles -- their equivalent of "o'clock", I'm thinking
> > about dividing the day into sixteenths, because it would be easy to
> > draw perfect halves on a sundial in the days before they had the
> > compass and the protractor.
>
> When mechanical clocks
> were invented, they used summer solstice to set the clocks.
 Clever idea! Is there any cultural significance and religious mythology
associated with having the night or the daytime split into two Halves?

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