Re: Attic months

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On 1/3/06, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>
>>The earlier systems appear to have used an 8 year cycle of 99 lunations,
>>i.e. three years in the cycle had an extra intercalated month.
>
>
> ... hence the alternating 49- and 50-month intervals between
> Olympiads.  No matter how your particular city state arranged the
> months into years, everyone could see and count the moon phases, so
> they neatly sidestepped the calendrical differences that way.
Yep.

[snip]

>>But while the Metonic cycle caught on (it is still used for the modern
>>Hebrew calendar and for determining Easter in both the Old and the New
>>style calendars), the Callipic cycle did not catch on. I guess a 76 year
>>cycle was felt just too long for practical use.
>
>
> Perhaps, but the new-style calendar has a 400-year cycle, so I'd
> expect 76 to be manageable.
Yes, but in the new-style calendar it's only a matter of intercalating a
single day every so often, and the rule is pretty simple: "A year is a
leap year if it is evenly divisible by 4 and is not evenly divisible by
100, or is evenly divisible by 400."

But with the Metonic & Callipic cycles it's a question of intercalating
a whole month, and knowing whether the intercalated month is of 29 or 30
days. One has to know where one is in the cycle. Even in the Metonic
cycle, one has to know whether it is the 3rd, 5th, 8th, 11th, 16th or
19th year as those will contain 13 months, while the rest have only 12.

Although I haven't been able to discover details, presumably the
Callipic cycle was not just four consecutive Metonic cycles; there must
have been differences in each of the four 19-year periods, otherwise
there'd be no point in having the longer cycle. So presumably one would
not merely need to know where one was in a 19-year period, but also
which of the four 19-year periods one was in.

Even the 19-year Metonic period seems more complicated than our 400-year
new-style cycle. The extra complication of the Callipic must have been
felt by most not worth the gain in accuracy.

>
>>It seems that in the classical pronunciations, the mid vowels /e/ and
>
> /o/ had,as
>
>>in Middle English, _two_ long pronunciations, one high & the other low.
>
>
> And they were phonemically distinct?   I didn't know that - about Mid.
> English either.
Yes - apparently so. The higher sounds were spelled |ee| and |oo| or just
|e| and |o| in unblocked syllables, whereas the lower sounds were spelled
|ea| and |oa| respectively.

>
>>For a reasonable description of ancient Greek pronunciation, I suggest
>>Sidney Allen's "Vox Graeca"
>
> That sounds like a winner; I own his _Vox_Latina_.  But shouldn't the
> title of the Greek one be in Greek instead of Latin? :)
Ἡ ἑλληνικὴ φωνή   ?

>
>>But better still IMO, if you read French...
>
>
> Not well enough for a technical nonfiction book to be anything but a
> long laborious exercise in avoiding RSI from frequent
> dictionary-flipping. :)
Sounds like me with German   :)

--
Ray
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