Re: The English/French counting system (WAS: number systemsfromconlangs)

At 11:04 AM 9/16/03 -0400, you wrote:
>On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Isidora Zamora wrote:
>
> > Interrupting the week cycle is untenable.  There are too many religious
> > people in the world for whom the weekly cycle is important to their
> > worship, and they could never just add a day to make things come out even
> > at the end of the year.  If that sort of internatioanl standard were
> > adopted, not only would it be a different day of the month for me, but the
> > days of the week would no longer match up between the civil and liturgical
> > calendars.
>
>Was this one of the reasons that the 10-day week of the Revolutionary
>Calendar didn't succeed as well as the rest of metric system? What other
>factors were there?
You'll need to ask a Russian (or at least someone from the former Soviet
Union) for the whole story.  I do know that the populace was (of course)
used to running on a 7-day week.  There were tens of millions of Orthodox
Christians in the Soviet Union (rather fewer after some 40 million were
martyred for their faith), and they did not stop counting out liturgical
time in 7-day weeks.  (I have read in one man's memoirs how his father, and
all his father's workers, kept the Wednesday and Friday fasts consistently,
and according to Church time, during the period of time that the Soviets
had changed the number of days in the civil week to 5 and 6.)  The
liturgical cycle runs on a 7-day week, and it doesn't work
otherwise.  There were also Jews and Muslims in the Soviet Union, and
neither of those religions can run on anything other than the traditional
7-day week, as far as I know.

I don't know what other factors besides religion caused the failure of
weeks of different lengths -- other than the obvious point that it would
have made Soviet timekeeping completely out of synch with the entire rest
of the world, and that alone could have led to its discontinuation, even
had there not been strong religious opposition to it among the populace.

But, like I said, ask a Russian if you want to know more.  I'm only Russian
Orthodox, and not Russian at all myself.

Isidora

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