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There are a lot of different calendar systems in the world, and I really like learning about
them. They each have their own interesting quirks, and they tend to be really important
to the cultures they’re from, marking important holidays and events and stuff. Imma be honest
tho, when I try to forget about that and just look at them from a kind of design perspective,
a lot of them them suck. Not just that, they suck in ways that would just be REALLY simple
and easy to fix and I don’t understand why we measure time this way, so how about I go
on a little rant about it and try teaching you guys a bit about calendar systems along
the way. Besides days, there are, fundamentally, two
things that happen in the sky that people use to measure time. One: the moon goes in
a circle around the earth causing the phases of the moon, and it takes about twenty nine
and a half days to do so. Two: the earth goes in a circle around the sun, causing the seasons,
which takes three hundred sixty five days plus about six hours. From these two events,
we get two things: the month, and the year. But, you will note, there is a problem: lunar
months do not fit evenly into solar years. The moon goes around the earth roughly twelve
point four times in the time it takes the earth to go around the sun, so having twelve
months in a year is too few while thirteen months is too many. Oh no, how will we ever
create a time-keeping system that accounts for this? Well, people have come up with three
main ideas, one of which even makes sense but I’ll save it for last.
Stupid idea number one: Let’s make months just one twelfth of a year! This is called
a solar calendar, and the idea is that, by making months an average of thirty point four
days instead of twenty nine point five, you make it so that twelve months fit evenly into
a year. The calendar system of my culture, the gregorian calendar, is one such system,
and it is *** IDIOTIC. If we’re not going to have months that line up with the
lunar month, why do we even have months anymore. We could accomplish the exact same thing by
just numbering our days after every spring equinox or something. Dates would have two
numbers on them: the year and the day of the year. It would be so much simpler and easier
and do exactly the same thing, so why the do we keep around these weird units of time
that slowly fall out of sink with the phases of the moon?
Stupid idea number two: instead of changing months to fit the year, change the year to
fit the months! These are called lunar calendars, and they make a year exactly twelve lunar
months, or about 354 days instead of 365. This is the system that the Islamic calendar
uses, which explains why muslims don’t really have a christmas/hanukkah equivalent. Muslim
holidays happen in a slightly different season each year, and it’s kinda hard to have a
winter holiday when twenty years later it’s turned into a summer holiday. Now, I wanna
make a quick disclaimer: if you’re a muslim and think that god has ordained that everyone
should fast once every twelve months and that we should use this calendar to keep track
of certain holidays and observances and such, ok, fine, those are perfectly harmless beliefs
and I have no problem with them. But, and I know I say this at the risk of coming across
as just another westerner talking about how barbaric Islam is, but I hope you don’t
mind if I say that, from the perspective of someone who doesn’t believe any of that,
this just looks kinda stupid. Maybe not quite as stupid as our calendar, like, I guess if
you’re going to base everything off of the moon and just ignore the solar year you might
as well start recycling month names every twelve months or something. But, I mean, at
least our calendar is useful for, like, farming and stuff where you need to pay close attention
to the seasons. Point is, whereas we’re left with these vaguely month-like months
that aren’t actually months, you guys wind up with these vaguely year-like years that
aren’t actually years, and I have trouble deciding whether that’s better or worse.
And now, allow me to introduce the third idea, and the only one that makes any sense at all:
lunisolar calendars, where you VARY THE NUMBER OF MONTHS IN A YEAR. Make the year sometimes
have thirteen months and sometimes have twelve. Months will always line up with the phases
of the moon and they’ll also always be in the same season. Most of the calendar systems
I’ve read about actually work this way, including the Jewish calendar, the Chinese
Calendar, the Indian calendar and loads of others! Which makes sense, of course most
people in the world would do things this way, this is the obvious solution to an easy problem
and I DO NOT GET why the two most popular calendar systems in the world each do something
else. *sigh* ok, I got that out of my system. Rant
over. Back to linguistics.