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Oct. 24th, 2015 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethsome random links on tumblr lead to a bunch of how-to guides for inventing calendars.
... they all irritate me so far because they don't start with orbital mechanics.
The funniest thing though is they one and all agree that all these fiddly little variable months and quarter days are just the worst. That's the first thing they throw out! Really, the worst.
And I reckon if you want recogniseable humans on another planet, or even a different civilisation on this one, the first thing you're going to get is random encrusted variables.
Some guy comes up with a calendar, and it's near enough. Except you wait a few years and your solstice has wandered off towards your equinox. So okay, what to do? Leap years? Bung in an extra month? Have a few corrective days at some boss dude's fiat and then keep going as before?
The answer is all of the above, depending on who wins the argument this side of the mountain, or the river, or the sky.
And that's without figuring that the original calendars will be different on different continents for sure, and probably far more often than that.
Half a dozen 'how to' in a row started out with 'Earth's calendar has' , though one of them admitted (in the West anyway). And right there they are so very wrong. Because you've got your solar year civilisations and your lunar year civilisations, and they all live interpenetrated even now. And even when you agree how long a year is, when it starts depends on too many things. 'New Year' isn't a beginning for anything except the paper calendar, work restarts in the Spring and education in the Autumn and never the two line up.
I've vaguely wanted to know how we end up with a seven day week, and when that started, and who uses it. *googles*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#.22Weeks.22_in_other_calendars
Ancient Near East, probably something to do with planets maybe, and other places use/d 'weeks' between 4 and 10 days. After that it's a question of terminology, because translators use 'fortnight' or 'month', though 'week' seems to be tied up to this 'rest day' cycle that not everywhere used anyways.
Actual Earth civs? All the calendars. None of them meshed and all of them were great big political and religious arguments in the making, not to mention business implications.
And it's not just fantasy writers/gamers who get annoyed with the math. There's a bunch of attempts to tidy up the calendar and make it all regular and fitting together. It just turns back into a mess again in fairly short order when it grinds between habit and neighbours.
You want to invent a new civilisation and you're going to bother thinking about how they think about time?
Simplification is the last thing you want to do.
... though as most of the links pointed out, it do bear consideration how often that's even going to come up. And if your readers/players really want to be fiddling about with it.
But still. The SF writer in me says it should start with figuring out what lights are in the sky, and what kind of orbits you're talking, and how much wiggle there is in the seasons. And if they somehow settle on a 7 day week with none of our cultural precedents in common, you'd better have an actual reason.
... they all irritate me so far because they don't start with orbital mechanics.
The funniest thing though is they one and all agree that all these fiddly little variable months and quarter days are just the worst. That's the first thing they throw out! Really, the worst.
And I reckon if you want recogniseable humans on another planet, or even a different civilisation on this one, the first thing you're going to get is random encrusted variables.
Some guy comes up with a calendar, and it's near enough. Except you wait a few years and your solstice has wandered off towards your equinox. So okay, what to do? Leap years? Bung in an extra month? Have a few corrective days at some boss dude's fiat and then keep going as before?
The answer is all of the above, depending on who wins the argument this side of the mountain, or the river, or the sky.
And that's without figuring that the original calendars will be different on different continents for sure, and probably far more often than that.
Half a dozen 'how to' in a row started out with 'Earth's calendar has' , though one of them admitted (in the West anyway). And right there they are so very wrong. Because you've got your solar year civilisations and your lunar year civilisations, and they all live interpenetrated even now. And even when you agree how long a year is, when it starts depends on too many things. 'New Year' isn't a beginning for anything except the paper calendar, work restarts in the Spring and education in the Autumn and never the two line up.
I've vaguely wanted to know how we end up with a seven day week, and when that started, and who uses it. *googles*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#.22Weeks.22_in_other_calendars
Ancient Near East, probably something to do with planets maybe, and other places use/d 'weeks' between 4 and 10 days. After that it's a question of terminology, because translators use 'fortnight' or 'month', though 'week' seems to be tied up to this 'rest day' cycle that not everywhere used anyways.
Actual Earth civs? All the calendars. None of them meshed and all of them were great big political and religious arguments in the making, not to mention business implications.
And it's not just fantasy writers/gamers who get annoyed with the math. There's a bunch of attempts to tidy up the calendar and make it all regular and fitting together. It just turns back into a mess again in fairly short order when it grinds between habit and neighbours.
You want to invent a new civilisation and you're going to bother thinking about how they think about time?
Simplification is the last thing you want to do.
... though as most of the links pointed out, it do bear consideration how often that's even going to come up. And if your readers/players really want to be fiddling about with it.
But still. The SF writer in me says it should start with figuring out what lights are in the sky, and what kind of orbits you're talking, and how much wiggle there is in the seasons. And if they somehow settle on a 7 day week with none of our cultural precedents in common, you'd better have an actual reason.
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no subject
Date: 2015-10-24 04:55 pm (UTC)So it's nice to see creativity with this stuff, I guess, but it usually doesn't bother me when, say, Star Wars uses a time keeping system that's basically just our 24 hour time.
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Date: 2015-11-03 09:30 pm (UTC)