From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Sat Oct 28 14:15:13 2000 Return-Path: X-Sender: iad@math.bas.bg X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-6_2_1); 28 Oct 2000 21:15:13 -0000 Received: (qmail 4122 invoked from network); 28 Oct 2000 21:15:08 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 28 Oct 2000 21:15:08 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lnd.internet-bg.net) (212.124.64.2) by mta3 with SMTP; 28 Oct 2000 21:15:06 -0000 Received: from math.bas.bg (ppp96.internet-bg.net [212.124.66.96]) by lnd.internet-bg.net (8.9.3/8.9.0) with ESMTP id WAA29265 for ; Sat, 28 Oct 2000 22:55:18 +0300 Message-ID: <39FB1762.43D1D0BB@math.bas.bg> Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 21:13:54 +0300 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.74 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] RE: month names References: <6.d42ce5f.272c4949@aol.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 4731 pycyn@aol.com wrote: > Well, actually {la .oktobr} makes a lot of sense. As ivan > points out, numbered months are ambiguous, depending on calendar > involved and there are at least five in common usage [...]. Don't get me wrong though: when I suggested that borrowing the Latin names made sense, I didn't mean to deny the even greater advantages of referring to them by numbers when the context is not in doubt. > But, so far as I can remember [...], most places that use the > western calendar also use the month names, Even so, most places. There are a few languages (and varieties thereof) that have their own month names, mostly derived from natural phenomena or local festivals, and there are some others that number the months (Chinese _shi2yue4_ `10-month', ie `October'). > I am not sure what happens in more remote (from me) countries > where the western calendar is used for civil purposes but > some other serves for reality (festivals, birthdays, ....). I'd guess that the fewer uses the Western calendar has somewhere, the less likely it is that its months will have special names. > Days of the week on the other hand seem to vary pretty freely, > so that the "oneday" "twoday"... patterns seems more universalizable > than any "sunday","moonday", "thundergodday" or whatever pattern. Unfortunately, that's not quite the case. Languages disagree on the day on which the numbering should start; Tuesday is Day 2 in the Slavic reckoning, but Day 3 in Greek and Day 4 in Swahili. --Ivan