More useless musing alert...
I'm not sure what to think of this whole month system. They each have different numbers of days, though necessarily so for cosmological reasons. But then there's this issue where February mysteriously gets short changed with respect to the rest... and not by just 1 day but 2 (or even 3). Creates an imbalance. 12 months is a bit unusual as well but it works out better than 10 I suppose, seeing as how 12 divides by 4 seasons whereas 10 does not. Now there was a time where there were 10 months in an ancestor to our western calendar system, hence the names for September through December (7 through 10). But when they added the 2 extra months couldn't they have had the decency to add them to the end AFTER December, so at least those month name prefixes would have made sense? Was that so much to ask?
I would just say abandon the whole month system and operate by weeks, or even days as Mulysa suggested... but I recognize at least some convenience for having months as a middle granularity. Still, they should re-divvy up the days and rename the months. On the other hand, perhaps we don't really need 12 months. I think that 4 months is sufficient, corresponding to the 4 seasons, and aligned so that they start on sensible days, like the summer and winter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes... or something derived from them. Then each month gets 91 days except summer which arbitrarily gets 92 and winter gets a little boost on leap years. Of course some things like rent, loan payments, and paychecks should get moved to a weekly or some other sub-month schedule but that wouldn't be too different... e.g. have rent due on the first, thirty-first, and sixty-first of each month.
2 comments:
I've always been proponent of 10 months. Each would have 36 days and there would be a 5 (or 6) day holiday period at the end/start of every year.
Regarding operating by weeks, I was suprised when working in Germany at my last job how everything was planned around the week number. All calendars had the week number as prominently labelled as the month. Meetings were always planned for "week 22", never "the last week in May".
The Egyptians I think started with something like that, 360 days with 5 holy days and I remember reading that at one time months did have 30 days uniformly. 10 or 12, well, so long as it's consistent and makes sense. I have other opinions on the number 10 though. Stay tuned...
As for the week thing, makes sense to me, though sadly, it doesn't divide evenly and some confusion must be apparent when the last week stradles the new year... which is most of the time.
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