Nobody ever explained in school that the reason the numbers in the names of September, October, November, and December (7, 8, 9, 10) don't match up to their actual month number (9, 10, 11, 12) is because the Roman calendar began in March, not January. If you start from March, they line up perfectly. It also explains why the seemingly arbitrary choice of storing the extra leap day in February makes sense--just tack it onto the end!
Originally, the year started on the first day of Spring: the Equinox. That was originally arranged to be the 1st of March, but slippage over the years means that the Equinox falls on or around the 21st of March in today's world. The New Year on 1st March also explains why the Leap Day falls after the 'last day of the year' on a day of its own: the 29th February.
I'd like to see a new calendar that reverts to the Equinox as the New Year's day and has the 28th February (and the 29th February if needed) as special 'Non-Week-Days' as part of a New Year Holiday Period. That would allow the New Year to start on the same day of the week as the previous year. In other words, we would have a perpetual calendar that never changes from one year to the next.
And then I think about every bit of code that I would need to write to support it and. From deep down inside, where my heart and soul are I can hear the screams "fuck no, fuck that".
And then I remember that I only do consulting now and get paid by the hour and think "chaching, carry on with this as you please".
Transition for all the badly set up systems... Y2K v2 baby!
Cognitive overhead for Users, therefor Product and therefor Developers will be huge. I think a lot of the rage will be fendign off stupid and bad ideas more than anything else.
Note: any one who deals with dates and deep history will have a chuckle and think nothing of it.
Perpetual calendars are a bad idea because of skipping special days. How long until the next Thursday? It depends on if it is February or a leap year. Think of how complicated the logic will be to calculate the day of the week.
The point of weeks is to have consistent cycle that can organize life. Also, why is it advantage to have the same day of week for same day of year? I suspect most people would prefer that their birthday wander around instead of always on Thursday. Calendars solved the problem of figuring out the day of week, and computers make it even easier.
Even without that issue, many Orthodox Christians still use the Julian rather than the modern Gregorian calendar for religious purposes (while still using the Gregorian for daily life). That's why Orthodox Christmas and Easter are on different days than the Catholic/Protestant ones.
Even the Roman Catholic Church that uses the Gregorian Calendar has moveable dates: Easter Sunday always falls on a Sunday and not on fixed day of a fixed month. On the other hand, Christmas day is always on December 25. Go figure.
You would end up with the "religious week" and the "standard week" moving relative to one another over the years, in a classic case of trying to fix messy details and thereby adding more details (as in https://xkcd.com/927/).
This presupposes that the current socioeconomic system is the fixed norm. I don't think self-sustaining farming communities of the past cared too much which day it was if they had a cause of celebration. Likewise, I don't see why a post-scarcity future society wouldn't party on a Tuesday.
Our "fixed norm" might be temporary in the Grand Scheme of Things(TM), but for the typical human life span, it could still work out to be nothing but... birthdays on Tuesdays :-/
In such situations, I can see the culture adapting so that you have a "real birthday" and a "celebration birthday".
Famously, Queen Elizabeth II was born on 21 April 1926, but her official birthday was also celebrated on the second Saturday in June each year in the UK.
One issue is the religious aspects. For example Abrahamic religions base their whole calendar on the unending 7 day week. Having a non-weekday smudged in is very sacrilegious to may adherents.
It's surprising, in a way, but time is very much a political and religious thing.
> I'd like to see a new calendar that reverts to the Equinox as the New Year's day and has the 28th February (and the 29th February if needed) as special 'Non-Week-Days' as part of a New Year Holiday Period. That would allow the New Year to start on the same day of the week as the previous year. In other words, we would have a perpetual calendar that never changes from one year to the next.
Alas, that would wreak havoc around the world, because I'm fairly sure that even if you can convince civil authorities, Christians, Muslims and Jews around the world won't be so easily convinced to shift around their God given days of worship (Sunday, Friday and Saturday respectively).
So their rest days would drift every year through the civil week.
Oh yes, absolutely in favor of starting the year in the equinox (or at solstice). And while we are at it: change the days of a month to match the cycle of the moon - 28 days. So we would have 13 months. That's how they came to be: the earths rotation around itself is a day. The moons rotation around the earth is a month - and the earths rotation around the sun is a year.
But I believe, the natural rhytms are not perfect and constant, so I cannot claim, that this calendar would "never change from one year to the next". But I like the idea of directly refering to the natural cycles, instead of arbitary ones.
But like the other comment said, implementing any change of dates in reality won't be welcome, nor workfree ..
Interestingly the beginning of a lunar month is static (the new moon happens at the same moment everywhere on earth) while the beginning of a calendar month is sequential around the earth by timezone. The lunar cycle, earth orbital cycle (year) and earth rotational cycle (day) do not really sync up. There are approximately 12.37 lunar cycles per year (so once every 3ish years there is a 13th moon which roughly correlates to a "blue moon" although more specifically a blue moon is the second full moon in a given quarter. Each lunar cycle is not consistently the same length. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Source: I spent some time trying to mesh a lunisolar calendar model with our modern Gregorian model (https://www.cycalendars.com). I can't recommend lunisolar calendars as an efficient way of communicating consistent dates. Time becomes radial rather than sequential and integer timestamps cease to exist. But it is cool. :-)
The original Roman calendar was based on lunar-solar calendars, and they don't line up with a solar year, because a moon cycle is 29.5 days, not 28. The Jewish calendar is one such calendar. It's why Jewish holidays vary so much. Some Christian holidays are based around moon cycles, like Easter. All lunar-solar calendars get around this problem by adding an extra month every few years.
Well sort of. Christian holidays were originally based on the same cycle as the Jewish Holidays but then the church fathers didn't like having to go ask the nearest Rabbi when their holidays were and tried to do it algorithmicly with absolutely no consoltation with anyone that knew anything about time keeping or astronomy and invented the ecclesiastical equinox (always March 21), and ecclesiastical full moon, neither of which bares relation to any astronomical event.
I also think each year should start at spring equinox. However, I think that the day of week should be how it is rather than being the same day of week each time.
Actually, I think Solar Hijri calendar will be good, but using Scientific Anno Mundi (not the usual Anno Mundi, and not Hijrah either).
I wonder on how many days you could celebrate new year in the same year with various cultures. New Year's Eve, Chinese New Year, Roman new year. I think there's an old Russian new year too.
What's "weird" is i think we were taught in school that July and August were added by the Caesars (with their names), causing the 2 month shift you mention. Now i wonder where that idea came from, after this neat article.
edit: Oh a cool fact in this tangent: the astronomer who discovered Planet 7 attempted to name it after a human—his patron, the British monarch George III. That would be an entertaining alternate history if it had gone that way!
The best part of course is we use similar month names, but as they are anchored to agricultural seasons, they correspond to different latin names in different countries.
I wonder if it has something to do with this, from the article:
> On Sosigenes' advice, Caesar added another two never-before-seen months to the year 46BC, one of 33 days and one 34, to bring the calendar in line with the Sun. The additions made the year the longest in history at 445 days long, with 15 months.
The two additional months were a one-time-only thing for that year, but I can see wires getting crossed and having that be a thing that was repeated for a while.
July and August were never added, though, simply renamed.
At the other end of that scale is Commodus, who wanted every month named after one of his 12 names: Lucius, Aelius, Aurelius, Commodus, Augustus, Herculeus, Romanus, Exsuperatorius, Amazonius, Invictus, Felix, and Pius
Apparently they were renamed (from the no longer accurate Quintilius and Sextilius). Why they didn't get around to renaming the other numerical months, I don't know...
The Roman calendar started in January at least as far back as the second century BC, and my understanding is that our sources are inconsistent as to who changed it, when it was changed, and why it was changed. Also, most of our sources are writing well after the change occurred (generally, they date to first century AD). (This is why the Julian and Gregorian calendars start on January 1, because the calendar they're based on did as well! Although lots of European countries did decide for much of the past 2000 years to start the year on other days like December 25 or March 25 or Easter).
This gives me a vibe that a lot of the tradition of the Roman calendar numbering is based on a "just-so" story that is made up to explain an interesting fact without being based on any actual evidence.
Btw, March is named for the Roman god Mars. The god of war.
You can perhaps get a glimpse of Roman priorities from there.
If I remember right, part of the reason the Romans shifted to starting the year in January, was so that their consuls, who were elected for a calendar year each, would have two extra months to prepare. This become increasingly necessary as Rome expanded, and military campaigns went way beyond their local backyard.
Another fun aspect here: The Italian growing season is in the winter, not the summer. In July-September, it's really too hot and dry to grow much in the Mediterranean, but it's much cooler and wetter in December-February, hence when a lot of the grain is grown [0]. And that leads into why March is the for Mars, because that is when the campaigning season starts, because that is when a lot of the harvest has been taken in, so now you can pillage your way across the countryside with all the food for your consular armies already packed up, so you don't need huge baggage trains to move quickly across the landscape.
This is likely true for Greece as well. So the old myth about Penelope and the pomegranate seeds is actually talking about July-September, not the winter months. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the 'dead' season was the hot part of the year, not the cold part.
[0] I'm talking in general here. The specifics of a particular field, region, species, etc are very important to the ancient peoples and vary a lot over the whole region.
Specifics definitely vary. Eg inside Anatolia (which was well within the Greek known world), it can get very cold in Winter and stay cold until March. Mostly because much of the region has a rather high elevation.
Initially, there were no months after December, and the period of winter was not part of any month. When the calendar changed to have the year starting after December, they named January after the god of transitions.
I don't remember where I read this but I think the Romans got their calendar from Mesopotamia and it was based on a configuration of the sky from a few thousand years BCE. That configuration drifted so that's why we ended up here. I think the original January (or whatever it was called) was the start of spring.
March became the new year again throughout much of the West in the Middle Ages as it moved to the feast of the Annunciation. March 25th was New Year's Day in England until the Gregorian calendar was adopted in the 1750s!
How did we end up with the year starting in January? If you've got eight months and they're often named like that - e.g. "oct" for the 8th month - and you decide to add a couple for the time you're not counting during winter, wouldn't you add them at the end and say the year still starts in March? Or is that exactly what they did and we changed the end-of-year point layer (the article doesn't say)? If so, why did we change it?
There were different standards in Europe during the middle ages and early modern period. Some places retained a date closer to the Roman New Year around the vernal equinox. These places used the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25). Other places (usually in the north) inherited a date closer to the winter solstice and so they used the Feast of the Circumcision (January 1).
As trade between countries grew during the early modern period countries began to standardize on the Feast of the Circumcision. England was a holdout, though and if you look at record from the first half of the 18th century, they will often include both years for dates between Jan 1 and March 25. The British Parliament formally adopted "Circumcision dates" to come into agreement with the continent in 1751.
Thanks, so that does seem to confirm that when the Romans added Jan/Feb, they put them at the beginning of the year right from the start. Unfortunately it still doesn't really have an answer to why they didn't put them at the end, except that it fits with the chosen name (Janus = God of all beginnings. But of course you could name something before or after deciding where to put it).
For the Romans, the year was a government concept. They counted the years by the administration of a certain official. The change to start in January happened simply because they changed the date of inauguration for the council.
On the other hand, I did remember from school that January was named after Janus, the two faced Roman god of beginnings, so explaining the year started in March might have resulted in more questions than answers!
[Deleted something that duplicated part of the article]
Google tells me that Romans did celebrate birthdays. I'm curious what they did when they were on the calendar that omitted the days between December and March. Surely some people were born on off calendar days.
Did they just count the days of the off calendar time? Move the celebration to some time in the non-sucky part of the year?
The part that rarely gets mentioned - back then, months were only for the 'active' part of the year. The winter, when everybody stayed home, did not belong to any month at all.
