From pycyn@aol.com Sat Oct 28 14:06:55 2000 Return-Path: X-Sender: Pycyn@aol.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-6_2_1); 28 Oct 2000 21:06:54 -0000 Received: (qmail 95440 invoked from network); 28 Oct 2000 21:04:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m8.onelist.org with QMQP; 28 Oct 2000 21:04:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-d09.mx.aol.com) (205.188.157.41) by mta3 with SMTP; 28 Oct 2000 21:04:53 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-d09.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v28.32.) id a.c1.82b547e (4405) for ; Sat, 28 Oct 2000 16:03:14 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 16:03:14 EDT Subject: RE: month names To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Windows AOL sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com Not many things naturally come in twelves: even months and hours are highly artificial (there are actually 13 lunations in a year and hours are open to any kind of cutting you want, though even the wildest metricists never seem to have come to a 10 -- or 20 -- hour day, each with 100 minutes, each with 100 seconds, and so on), And even eggs are no longer put into those roughly square boxes of 3 x 4. But the roman month names are still close to universal -- even when other names are common, the roman ones are still, on a bet, understood and used in legal documents, say. (Forgetting the Revolutionary Calendar with its Brumiare and Thermidor). Seasonal names ("the moon of acorn harvesting" and the like) re clearly out for international usage. Shifting to other systems: the lunation calendar, or the half-months named for letters of some alphabet or other, or the season-and-week system from the card deck (or the 18 20-day periods of the Mayans -- or is it 20 18-day periods? -- and then the party), are all beside the point, since we need word for the system we are in. The more local systems can fend for themselves -- and they happily seem tied to more or less single languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Hindi in a very extended sense), so their month names can be transliterated without qualms (though not without problems, I'll bet). Is the variation in names for the civil calendar all that great that it should be an exception? On the other hand, we officially use numbers in dates, so perhaps we should just use numbers in the names as well (or never use the names at all?)