--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, R A Brown <ray@C...> wrote:
>
> Mark J. Reed wrote:
> > On 1/3/06, R A Brown <ray@c...> 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 á¼`λληνικὴ 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
> ==================================
> ray@c...
>
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
> ==================================
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