Subject: RE: month names

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 16:03:14 EDT

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?)