Talk:Calendar

Some reformatting needed?

and additions, especially where it just links to a main article. Lockeownzj00 06:25, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

If you're thinking of placing main article links within the headings, then don't. That is to be avoided according to the Wikipedia:Manual of Style (headings). — Joe Kress 19:01, Feb 13, 2005 (UTC)

"new" calendars

Should we say something about the phenomenon of people trying to build new calendars (such as http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Triangular_Earth_Calendar ) ? Is there a name for this, perhaps something like constructed calendar, analogous to constructed language ?

Some proposed calendars are at calendar reform. — Joe Kress 05:10, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Etymology

When the new moon was first seen? — LlywelynII 18:48, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Historical section pretty bad

Oh, and the historical treatment omits East Asia and Mesoamerica. Also,

Nevertheless, the Roman calendar contained remnants of a very ancient pre-Etruscan 10-month solar year.[2]

The link is active and the archived link is dead/useless. Not sure how that even happens.

More important, what is this bit even trying to say? Lunation and the yearTemplate:Mdashmeaning seasonsTemplate:Mdashwere commonly used. The Pre-Etruscan Romans used the seasons. On a straight reading, there's no contradiction involved and no need to bring up the ancient-to-the-point-of-widely-disbelieved Roman legend in such a terse and broad section. (Granted, it's a modern Enc Brit source for the point but the claim is rather overstated. See Roman calendar for the widespread disagreement that this ever even existed.) On an implicit reading that an editor took the first sentence to mean lunar months and the solar year were always everywhere used together except in ancient Italy... well, that's just absurdly wrong. If anything, the Egyptians were the ones we should single out for specifically caring about the solar year and not giving much of a damn about how the moon fit in. The generous reading is that they thoughtTemplate:Mdashlike many Romans themselves didTemplate:Mdashthat the 10 months were still completely lunar, which could have meant the months rapidly cycle through the seasons owing to the mismatch. That would be different from the first part of the first part of the paragraph. It's also almost certainly wrong, though. (See Roman calendar: Either there was an unclaimed winter period between agricultural seasons to fill in the missed time or the 10 "months" weren't lunar at all but based on seasonal observations. Some Romans similarly misunderstood the three Egyptian seasons as a 3-Roman-month year, which helped them feel better about how ancient Egyptian culture claimed to be... and in fact was.)

The Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar in 46 BC.[7] His "Julian" calendar was no longer dependent on the observation of the new moon, but followed an algorithm of introducing a leap day every four years. This created a dissociation of the calendar month from lunation.

Similarly, the Roman calendar was entirely divorced from actual observation of lunations for multiple centuries prior to the Julian reform, which was a shift in the mechanism of intercalation to agree with the long known and acted upon solar year of about 365¼ days. Just as important, it removed power from most other politicians to game the system to expand or shrink the year. (Apparently some governors still played games like feigning 14 month years to increase their tax hauls.)

Calendars in antiquity were lunisolar, depending on the introduction of intercalary months to align the solar and the lunar years. This was mostly based on observation, but there may have been early attempts to model the pattern of intercalation algorithmically...

This is similarly wrong. Lunar years aren't really a thing (we call 12 synodic months a "lunar year" just from rough analogy) and intercalation was heavily modeled, at least in Europe. I get that the ideas are weird and the math annoying. (All the moreso since ancient math was generally awful. The Romans themselves screwed up the first 36 years of the Julian system because they were adding the leap years inclusively... meaning every "fourth" year was actually every third. That required another 12 years of avoiding leap years to straighten out, meaning even the theoretically lucid Julian system wasn't actually in operation for its first 48 years.) The rhythm of prehistoric life was the seasons (almost entirely omitted from the historical treatment) frequently marked by animal behavior (fully omitted from the entire article) and the positions of major stars (ditto) or Jupiter (ditto). The history of accurate calendars has mostly been the game of trying to fit the lunar cycles into the solar year, meaningTemplate:Mdashat the timeTemplate:Mdashthe position of the sun against the fixed stars, which itself took time to figure out. The fights about computusTemplate:Mdashhow exactly the spring solstice should fit into the monthsTemplate:Mdashmight be inside baseball and unnecessary to do anything but link over to, but the octaeteris was a pretty big deal and the eclipse cycle was important early on, even if you don't want to get into the metonic cycle & the rest. — LlywelynII 18:41, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

"Dating style" listed at Redirects for discussion

File:Information.svg The redirect Dating style has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Template:Slink until a consensus is reached. cogsan _{(nag me) (stalk me)} 14:15, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Eurocentric bias?

Aztecs had 365 day calendars way before Europeans did?

They are known to have been in use since 600 BCE. Some calendars were so precise, that by the 5th century BCE, they were only 19 minutes off.

— Template:Comma separated entries

Wallby (talk) 11:29, 16 June 2025 (UTC)